Date: 1993-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fiction; Feminism; Science Fiction Fantasy; Unfinished; Speculative Fiction
Description: The pristine city of Elysium floats on the water world of Shora, inhabited by 'immortals' who have succeeded in unlocking the secrets of life. Outsider Blackbear Windclan wants to share the secret of immortality with his own people, but can he, and the City of Elysium, survive the corruption and decadence that immortality has bred into the ageless society. And what of the consciousness of self-aware nano-sentient servitors and their quest for vengence?

Daughter of Elysium

JOAN SLONCZEWSKI

Phoenix Pick

An Imprint of Arc Manor

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Daughter of Elysium copyright © 1993, 2010 Joan Slonczewski. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Cover based on artwork provided by Stephen Leigh.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Rider, Manor Thrift and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

ISBN (Digital Edition): 978-1-60450-416-3

ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-444-6

www.PhoenixPick.com

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Visit the Author’s Website at:

http://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/slonc.htm

Published by Phoenix Pick
an imprint of Arc Manor

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Daughter of Elysium

Contents

The Snake
The Child
The Dance Of Fire
The Immortals

***

Daughter of Elysium

Section 1: The Snake

Chapter 1

The sky of the Ocean Moon was blue enough, impossibly blue, bluer than the eye of a newborn. But its surface was not blue at all, as Doctor Blackbear Windclan had expected from the picture-perfect video brochure. As the shuttlecraft bore him and his family ever closer through the clouds, the curve of ocean appeared dusty green, as if a featureless meadow covered the globe. Could this really be Shora, the Ocean Moon?

To reassure himself, Blackbear squeezed the ankles of his two-year-old Sunflower, seated on his shoulders, then he touched the hand of his goddess, Raincloud. Raincloud was a linguist whose training in the tongue of a forbidden world had earned her a job on this free one.

Raincloud returned his look confidently. A goddess of elegant stature, she had the earth-toned complexion typical of their people, the Clickers of Bronze Sky. She carried on her hip their six-year-old Hawktalon, whose cascade of black braids twined in spirals like her mother’s. The braids, full of patterned beads, were works of art which Blackbear spent hours redoing each week. Mother and daughter wore their best rei-gi garments, as did Blackbear: russet linen trousers that flared like skirts, their hems bordered with embroidered volcanoes and fireweed. A belt tied the garment at the waist—for Raincloud, a black belt.

Blackbear adjusted his turban at his forehead. “This planet looks more like a swamp than an ocean.” Shora, home of the native Sharers and the ageless Elysians, was an ocean world—the only inhabited world covered entirely by ocean. And yet, the closer came the ocean’s surface, the more it looked like a field of vegetation, scraggly green and brown patches with brackish puddles in between. It made his stomach churn, already unsettled from the shifting g-forces of the shuttlecraft.

“Maybe it’s Valedon, by mistake,” he added, referring to Shora’s dryer moon-twin. A country doctor from the frontier of Bronze Sky, a world still largely uncharted, Blackbear distrusted all spacecraft and, for that matter, any contrivance that produced light and speech from no discernible origin.

But he would put up with it. For what he sought on this ocean, countless doctors would give their lives: the secret of immortality.

Raincloud laughed, eyeing the vast “swamp” some ten thousand meters below. “You could herd a lot of goats down there.” Her voice clicked crisply, in the language that had earned their people the epithet “Clickers.” Clickers farmed the Caldera Hills of the Dark Goddess, beneath a volcanic bronze sky. Twenty light-years distant, yet Bronze Sky was just a rei-gi tumble away from here, through a hole in the galactic Fold.

Hawktalon’s braids bounced, and she pulled herself up a notch on her mother’s back. “Can we really keep our goats after all, Mother? And have room to let the dogs run? Oh please, let’s send for the dogs—”

“No,” clicked Raincloud. “I told you, we’ll be indoors the whole time, within a giant Elysian city.”

“Shaped like a bubble, you said,” Hawktalon added.

Elysium, the republic of “immortals.” Elysians never aged. They lived a thousand years or more, within their twelve opulent “cellular cities” that floated upon Shora’s ocean.

“But even in Founders City,” Hawktalon reminded her mother, “people kept dogs.” The capital of Bronze Sky was the only city the six-year-old had ever known.

Raincloud looked up from the observation deck and turned toward the back of the carpeted oval compartment. “Servo, please,” she called. Raincloud spoke Elysian, the language of the ageless ones, as well as Sharer, the speech of the ocean-dwelling natives who long predated the Republic of Elysium. Most important, she spoke the language of Urulan, the dreaded barbarian world whose missiles threatened the worlds of the Free Fold. Elysian intelligence had recruited her for her knowledge of Urulite. “Servo, please tell us what makes this ocean brown when its sky is blue.”

The azure sky was no disappointment, Blackbear conceded, coming from a world whose volcanic dust painted its noonday sky yellow, with hours of blood-red sunset.

“A very perceptive and interesting question, Citizen,” came a sibilant voice from nowhere.

Blackbear frowned suspiciously. On his shoulders Sunflower bounced and craned his neck with interest, his stuffed wolf cub doll dangling in his father’s face.

“The answer, Citizen,” continued the servo voice, “is this. On Shora, by this time of year, the raft seedlings overgrow the entire ocean.”

So that was it. Living “rafts” like radial tree branches grew out onto the water. Unlike Elysians, the web-fingered Sharers actually lived outdoors upon the larger rafts.

As the servo spoke, Raincloud murmured simultaneous translation for Hawktalon. This talent had earned the goddess a job as interpreter for the Sharer embassy in Founders City, where Blackbear had studied medicine. Elysium, of course, had Sharer experts aplenty; their treaty with the ocean-dwellers required continual consultation. For Elysian Foreign Affairs, Raincloud would be translating signals from spy satellites at Urulan.

And Blackbear would do medical research, at the Longevity Laboratory of the famous scientist Tulle Meryllishon.

“In just two weeks,” the servo voice told the Windclans, “the giant seaswallowers will migrate from the south pole, consuming the overgrown raft seedlings you see below, along with anything else in their path. Despite our best efforts, one or two Sharer rafts are lost each year.”

“Lost?” Blackbear exclaimed. “But—what about us?” Elysian cities, like the living rafts, floated upon the ocean, each one a great sphere of nanoplast some four kilometers across. The city of Helicon, the Windclans’ destination, lay ahead now, a gleaming pearl set in the seedling-choked sea. The pearl grew steadily larger as they approached. A single dwelling for a million immortal souls; the sight of it took his breath away. Yet even a structure so huge could be swamped by the sea.

“The city of Helicon could be lost, Citizen,” the voice added. “Its surface was breached, once, forty years ago. If the leak had not been fixed, the city would have filled and sunk in fifty-three point six days.”

Sunflower bounced happily on Blackbear’s shoulders. “Snake, Daddy,” he clicked. “Ss-ss, I hear snake.” The sibilant Elysian voice, which the child could not understand, sounded like hissing.

Blackbear asked, “But what happens if—”

“Snake, Daddy.”

“All right, it’s a snake. Now be quiet, Sunny.” The child insisted on hearing his pronouncements repeated, to make sure their wisdom had sunk in.

Hawktalon laughed. “Sunny thinks he heard a snake. What a baby. It’s not even Snake Day yet.”

The servo added, “Does my vocalization fail, Citizen?”

Blackbear said, “No, but—”

“If so, please report my defect to Service Sector Oh-three-twenty in the Nucleus of Helicon, for training. Actually, Citizen, the sinking of Helicon or any other Elysian city is most unlikely; no such event has been recorded in nine centuries since the founding of the Republic. The city’s compartments are pressurized at all levels, and a buoyant fluid fills its transit reticulum, like a great living cell. Attention: Helicon’s surface lies just beneath us. See the sunlight sparkle on its shimmering dome? Prepare for landing.”

An indentation appeared in the city’s surface, as if an invisible giant had pressed a thumb into it. The thumbprint deepened and widened, and the shadow of the shuttlecraft fell across it.

At his side, Raincloud clicked, “Strap down again.”

The four of them returned to their seats, which automatically strapped them down for safety. Blackbear zipped Sunflower’s empty juice cup into his travel bag.

Hawktalon announced, “I’ll carry my own bag off the shuttle.”

“Sorry, you’ll ride for now,” her mother insisted. No respectable Clicker adult would walk in public without a child on her back, or his.

Hawktalon pouted, and her much-worn stuffed fruitbat hung listlessly. A bit old to be carried, she would have to put up with it until Raincloud conceived another child. Back home in Tumbling Rock, the clan always had a number of little ones to hold; but here, of course, they had only these two. Clicker goddesses spaced three or four years between children, to prolong the nursing of each.

The craft shuddered to a halt. “Thank you, Citizens, for enjoying my service. A reminder: You will be met at the transit node of Octant Six by your host, Alin Anaeashon, mate of Tulle Meryllishon...”

Tulle Meryllishon was the lab director. Meryllishon was not a clan name, for Elysium had no clans. The shon name referred to the nursery of birth. Each city had its central shon, where the children were born and raised in common.

This arrangement was incomprehensible to Blackbear, for in Tumbling Rock even orphans had extended families. But then, the Elysians could have no children of their own. Immortality came at a price.

The Elysians were sterile. Their lack of germ cells was a side effect of the genetic treatment of their embryos, in the artificial wombs of the shon. The embryos, all derived from non-Elysian sources, had to be grown in culture.

What was the link between aging and fertility? No scientist had yet cracked it, but Tulle Meryllishon was trying. That was the Fertility Project, which Blackbear had come to work on. There were frontier worlds to populate, new fertile hills to fill with growing families. Few non-Elysian parents cared to produce children who could expect no children of their own. But if the Fertility Project succeeded, every child in the Fold could be born immortal.

Outside the shuttle, the chill air brought a scent of orange and salt from Shora’s ocean. A wind shrieked overhead across the lip of the cavity which held them in the surface of the Elysian city.

Hawktalon winced and covered her eyes. “The sun—it burns, Mother.”

“Look away from it, dear,” Raincloud reminded her. This sun blazed without mercy through the clear blue sky, untempered by volcanic haze.

The lip of the cavity rose around them and constricted, blocking the sun. Now the lemon-colored disk of Valedon, Shora’s moon-twin, appeared against the blue. Then the shuttle lifted off out of the cavity, and the lip soon closed overhead.

The cavity now became an enclosed vesicle, diffusely lighted. Within the vesicle, so small after the expanse of sky and ocean, Blackbear felt trapped. But Sunflower caressed his forehead and leaned forward with interest. “Going downstairs,” the child clicked softly.

“Yes, Sunflower, ‘downstairs.’” The vesicle was floating downward at about a sixty degree angle, along a fluid-filled branch of the transit reticulum. The flow of liquid carried the vesicle in its path.

“Welcome, Citizens, to Helicon, capital of Elysium, home of butterflies for a thousand years.” Another disembodied servo voice. Blackbear’s hair stood on end. “Would you be seated, Citizens?” the voice added.

Raincloud said, “Yes, thank you,” in faultless Elysian.

Behind Blackbear, a lump of nanoplast pushed up and molded itself into a chair. The entire vesicle must be made of nanoplast, an “intelligent” material. But how could that stuff form such intricate shapes? Similar chairs took shape for the four of them. Hawktalon exclaimed with delight, and the beaded braids jangled about her face.

“If I ever fail to serve promptly, please report my defect to Service Sector Oh-three-thirteen. Now, the latest news. The Urulite Imperium claims that the Valan freighter Sardonyx entered Urulite space before it was destroyed. Urulan threatens Valedon itself with interstellar missiles...”

Ghostlike figures sprang up on a little holostage, before the incurving wall of the vesicle. Hawktalon shrieked and clapped her hands. Blackbear shuddered, wondering where such a backward planet as Urulan could have gotten interstellar missiles. What if they hit Shora as well as Valedon? At any rate, the news was bad enough without showing it in three dimensions.

The chair oozed to fit his shape as he stretched. Was there anything in Elysium not “alive,” responsive and motile? Or rather, were there any live Elysians, other than holo figures?

From the left, another vesicle entered the stream and approached alongside. Its surface touched and seemed to melt in. The two vessels fused, their walls joined and widened to reveal several passengers.

Elysians were small, compact people, rarely taller than Blackbear’s shoulder; they were designed to make the most of their living space. Their complexions ranged from pink to brown, one of them pale as cream; their genetic stock, Blackbear knew, included sperm and ova from all worlds of the Free Fold, even Bronze Sky. They wore Valan talars with long patterned trains, now bundled up by pairs of “trainsweeps.” Trainsweeps were beetlelike servos, with their six legs poking out beneath their polished shells, scurrying behind their masters to keep the trains in order. Their Elysian masters did not speak or even smile in greeting; a custom common to cities, Blackbear had learned during his medical training at Founders University. Back in Tumbling Rock, however, in the Caldera Hills, if one failed to recognize a passerby, one immediately said hello to make the acquaintance.

The nearest of the seated Elysians wore a train of unusual length, requiring two pairs of trainsweeps to carry the folds of pale green silk. He must have been at least five hundred years old, therefore; she or he, Blackbear could not tell which, he realized with a shock. A goddess, after all, he decided, much embarrassed, adjusting his turban self-consciously. A “woman,” an Elysian female, though the Elysian word did not connote all that the Clicker “goddess” did. Her hair fell unbraided to her shoulders, and her talar reached to her sandaled feet. The portion of her train that clasped her back was embroidered with butterflies, deep blue heliconians, their long wings marked by red bars and edged with white.

Each of Elysium’s twelve cities took a different butterfly as its emblem; heliconians, for Helicon. Blackbear had forgotten why this was so, but nonetheless he sighed to see something familiar. Bronze Sky, like Valedon and most other inhabited worlds, had been terraformed long ago with stock from ancient Torr. Shora had not; thus the native rafts and seaswallowers remained. But the first Elysians had brought butterflies from their terraformed home world.

“And now—trainsweeps and housekeepers on sale,” the servo voice continued. “The very best from Valedon.” Shora’s moon-twin was well known for the manufacture of servos. “All at The Golden Fritillary...” The shop address went beyond his grasp of Elysian.

“They’re selling goddesses,” clicked Raincloud mischievously.

Startled, Blackbear asked, “How’s that?”

“Well, in Urulite, our word ‘goddess’ would translate as ‘domestic property,’ which is what the Elysians have put on sale.” A trilingual pun.

“Well,” said Blackbear, “we’re far from Urulan and its barbarians, thank the Dark One.” Twice as distant as Bronze Sky, Urulan had closed itself to foreigners for two centuries, and allowed few of its own to venture out. Fortunately Raincloud would see no live Urulites in Elysium.

“Urulites aren’t all bad,” she reminded him. Raincloud had studied Urulite with an émigré professor, an escaped slave.

“The good ones leave or die.” Like Shora, Urulan had never been terraformed, but its people were as uncivilized as its plated fourteen-legged carnivores. In an age when most worlds traded freely across the Fold, Urulan’s goddesses were herded like sheep, and their male warriors fought each other with crude nuclear bombs. They even bred gorilla hybrids as slaves—like Raincloud’s old teacher.

Sunflower was tugging insistently at his father’s collar. “Doggie,” clicked the child.

“What’s that, Sunflower?”

“Sunflo’ see Doggie. Sunflo’ fly down. Fly down, see Doggie.”

Blackbear looked down. At the end of the Elysian’s bundled train, one of her six-legged trainsweeps wiggled back and forth slightly. “Sunflower, that’s not a dog, and you can’t fly down now.”

“Sunflo’ fly do-own!”

Raincloud shrugged. “Let him down, why not.”

“Me too!” Hawktalon slid to the ground.

There was no place to run, after all. Blackbear let Sunflower down and watched him toddle off on tiptoe after his sister, both swinging their animal dolls behind them. They inspected the trainsweep, taking in its every move.

Seeing them, apart, in this world of strangeness, Blackbear fought back a wave of anxiety. It was an old fear he had, about losing his child. It must have started years before, at age seven, when he had lost his youngest brother in the swollen river. He barely remembered what his brother looked like, now; whenever he recalled the incident, or dreamed it, it was Sunflower he saw in his arms.

No children. Those Elysians with their unburdened shoulders and smooth complexions, yet they might be eighty, or eight hundred...

Of course, there were Elysian children, Blackbear reminded himself. Raised in the artificial wombs of the shon, seeded from the best imported genetic stock, just enough children were born to offset mortality by accident and rare disease. Just enough to fill the jobs the city needed. But not enough for each one to carry one.

“Transit node, Octant Six,” said the voice. “Prepare to disembark.”

The vesicle had fused to several more vesicles by now, including one that descended from above and had to lower its occupants onto the platform. It had formed itself into a great length of sausage. After some minutes, its rate of flow lessened. Out of the translucent fluid ahead there appeared a white wall, into which the vesicle merged and opened. The Windclan family gathered up their bags and stepped out.

They entered a vast pulsating cavern. Here, vesicles fused to the cavern, while elsewhere new vesicles pinched off, flowing down other branches of the reticulum. The ceiling played a lightshow of butterflies, their long golden wings sporting black spots; another heliconian variant, he guessed. Below thronged the Elysians, their hair neither braided nor bound up in turbans, their trains extending back several meters to their trainsweeps. Countless servos mingled about, tall loud-spoken ones vending drinks and sweets, broad flat ones offering transport, disconcerting little insectlike ones quietly vacuuming the spotless floor. Even overhead, little bell-tinkling hovercraft glided by. And still, not a child to be seen....

It was not just that in the Caldera Hills, the fertile slopes and endless forests needed many hands for harvest, and children were the growth industry of a world with a dozen empty continents to populate, facing floods, fires and landslides along the way. Beyond that—

What was an adult without children? How could one even begin a conversation, without presenting one’s offspring or younger sib? Among Clickers, even children presented their dolls. Could these Elysians feel? Could they care about others? Was eternal youth worth the price?

Blackbear thought of his father with prostate trouble, and his last patient, the elderly woman from the next town whom he had treated for kidney failure just before he left home. Why was aging linked to fertility? Blackbear hoped soon to learn. The Fertility Project could change everything. Everyone might then have ageless children of their own. It was too late for Hawktalon and Sunflower, he thought with a pang, but then he and his goddess expected another six or seven children.

From Raincloud’s back, Hawktalon exclaimed, “Oh, look who’s here!”

The trainsweep had left its master and followed behind them. Astonished, Blackbear stared at its polished silver surface, which reflected splotches of gold from the ceiling butterflies.

Raincloud glared at her daughter. “It’s the one you were pestering.”

“Oh Goddess,” exclaimed Blackbear, his stomach in knots. “What if someone thinks we stole it?”

“We didn’t, Dad.” Hawktalon was indignant. “Go away, bad Doggie,” she told the trainsweep, but her cheerful tone belied her words.

Raincloud said, “We’ll leave it at ‘lost and found,’ somewhere. Servo?” she called. “Where’s that damned servo voice when we need it?”

He winced, wishing she would watch her language in front of the little boy.

Just then, Sunflower half slid off his shoulder and leaned toward a vendor, a servo shaped like a lamppost attached to a tray of scooped sweets. “Ice cream. Sunflo’ hungry.”

“No,” said Blackbear. “No ice cream, that’s that.” Wherever was that Elysian to meet them, he wondered.

The child tensed ominously. His eyebrows wrinkled, and the corners of his mouth pulled down. Then he let out a wail that caused heads to turn.

Blackbear hurriedly brought him down and rocked him in his arms, but it was no use. Sunflower screamed and flailed his limbs in all directions.

“Sh-sh.” Hawktalon covered her ears.

Raincloud was searching around. “Try to spot an ‘information vendor.’ They look like—”

A ringing bell sounded overhead. It was an airborne hovercraft. The hovercraft landed right in front of Blackbear. It spouted an Elysian phrase which he did not catch. Two servos emerged, emergency lights blinking around their heads.

“Please lay patient on the floor, head raised.” A stocky machine, about as tall as Hawktalon, spoke in the soothing tones of a flight attendant. “Some hyperventilation, we see.”

The other servo, shaped more like a lamppost, extended two long tentacles snaking around the child in Blackbear’s arms.

“No,” he shouted, adding in Click-click, “get off, by the Goddess!” He bent at the knees, his left foot slid back, then he twisted the grasping servo over in a somersault. Rei-gi aimed for gentle disengagement.

“Do not damage City property,” the lamppost intoned as it rearranged itself. “A fine may be charged.”

The stocky servo observed, “The child is foreign, a defective. We are not equipped to treat defectives. We must call reinforcements. Meanwhile, please lay patient on the floor.”

“Nonsense,” snapped Raincloud. “We’ll put you on the floor.” Raincloud had earned a black-belt, as did all goddesses, several levels higher than that permitted men. “Defective, indeed,” she muttered, her eyes dark as those of the six-armed Goddess of the Hills.

“Hai!” Hawktalon swung her hands up in a practice move.

“Pardon me...” An Elysian man stood nearby. “Doctor Windclan, I presume?”

The childless man wore a talar of tawny brown, almost like the sky of Bronze Sky. His train had a border of what looked like autumn leaves, unlike the gaudy butterflies of the other Elysians. Tall for an Elysian, he still had to look up to Blackbear’s face. His complexion was smooth as a baby’s, yet his impeccable grooming and composure marked his maturity.

“Yes?” said Blackbear hopefully.

With a slight bow, the man added, “I am Alin Anaeashon, mate of Tulle Meryllishon. Meeting you is my highest duty; my mate has told me so much about you.”

Of course, Blackbear recalled. The Director’s “mate” would have to meet him first, an Elysian custom. The same would be true for Raincloud’s supervisor, and for any other Elysian they had to meet.

Raincloud nudged him, whispering a phrase in his ear. Blackbear nodded stiffly; it was hard to bow, with the child on his neck. He returned the formal phrase. “My mate Raincloud will hear glowing reports of you.” He hoped his accent was not too bad. The word “mate” still bothered him; it could mean either goddess or consort.

“Such an honor,” said Alin. “And your... little friend; has he received proper care?”

The child was still sobbing on and off.

Blackbear said, “Let me present Sunflower, my...”

“... shonling,” prompted Raincloud.

“And here’s Fruitbat,” clicked Hawktalon, extending her stuffed animal.

Sunflower buried his face in his father’s shoulder, but held out Wolfcub by its tail.

“The defective was hyperventilating,” insisted the servo. “The foreigners obstructed our care. Reinforcements will arrive.”

Sure enough, a second hovercraft was settling beside the first.

“Your training is defective,” Alin calmly told the servo. “First, foreigners require consent for treatment. Second, the patient is clearly a shonling.”

The servos immediately drew back. “He is not registered with any shon,” said one. The lamppost-type added, “Please report our defect to Service Sector Two-seven-twenty.”

Immediately the servos reentered their hovercraft and took off. Sunflower was calmer now, just sniffing at intervals. “Bird,” he clicked, eyeing the departing hovercraft. “Bird fly away.”

“Well.” Alin smiled slightly. “Sorry, the medics were only trying to help. If you register your child with the Helishon, you’ll have no more trouble.” The Helishon was the main nursery-womb of Helicon.

“We plan to register,” said Blackbear. “But we’ve only just arrived.”

“I say...” Alin was looking past Blackbear to something behind him in the street.

Blackbear turned. There was the runaway trainsweep still, behind him now, as if carrying an invisible train. His heart sank again. “It followed us out of the vesicle,” he explained, much embarrassed.

Alin gave a peal of laughter, like a delighted child; for the first time, the Elysian seemed to come alive as a real person. “I expected you in native dress, but—a trainsweep without a train? Tulle will love it!” His look of gravity returned. “Never mind; its network must have crossed connections and oriented to you by mistake. Just look up its owner and give his mate a call.”

Raincloud asked, “Couldn’t we just turn it off?”

Alin shook his head. “It might take a while to retrain. Let’s get you to your house, shall we?” He motioned them to follow. Blackbear thought of his longhouse on the mountainside, with the goats scampering down to pasture below. “We’ll just take the next vesicle, this branch, and tell the servo your address. You’ll need rest; we’ll get acquainted tomorrow, on the way to the lab. No problem, tomorrow’s another Visiting Day for me.” The Elysians had a three-day work week, restricted by law. An inefficient way to do business; but then, the immortals could take their time.

Hawktalon clapped her hands. “Oh Daddy, can I go to the lab, too?”

Raincloud answered, “Not tomorrow. You must come with me, to meet important people.” Raincloud wanted to show off her firstborn goddess at Foreign Affairs.

“Next week,” Blackbear promised. As the long golden train behind Alin passed before him, he suddenly saw that what looked like dead leaves in the border pattern were in fact butterflies after all, anaeans, their crinkled brown wings evolved to resemble litter on the forest floor. Clever camouflage; these butterflies were more than they seemed.

Their Elysian host led them down a “street” that felt more like a tunnel, Blackbear thought. The facades at either side were all shaped like the profile of an hourglass, their foundations curving down into the street while their upper stories arched into the luminous sky-ceiling. The shop windows were wide open, without even mesh screens to keep out insects. Not that he had seen any insects, save for an enormous garden of butterflies; the sight drew his gaze backward as they passed.

“Here’s your house,” said Alin at last.

Blackbear saw what appeared to be the faint trace of a doorway in the wall before him, at the end of a gently sloping ramp. He gave Alin an uncertain look, trying to muster up the courage to ask the location of the handle. But before he did so, the center of the door pinched in and molded outward, until a doorway had formed, jambs and all. His toes curled within his shoes.

“You’ll get used to nanoplast,” Alin assured him. “It always startles foreigners at first. Think of it as a sort of modeling clay inhabited by billions of molecular servos. That’s what they told me when I was a shonling.”

Blackbear smiled despite himself. This Elysian had not forgotten his own childhood, after all his centuries.

“Thanks for your help,” said Raincloud. “When should we expect our luggage?” Traveling on Bronze Sky, their luggage had always seemed to end up behind.

Alin paused as if surprised. “Is anything missing?”

Blackbear blinked, then looked inside.

The solid oak dining table, its legs fully assembled, stood in the near room, upon the woolen rug woven by Blackbear’s brothers for his wedding. The curtains, which he had sewn to fit the windows back home and expected to have to redo completely, now hung upon windows shaped perfectly to fit. Raincloud’s clan portrait, with her three sisters, twelve brothers, and assorted nieces and nephews, and himself beside her, hung right there on the wall. He had packed it away in three layers of wrapping.

Blackbear felt shock and indignation. Who had dared to go through their things?

Hawktalon skipped through the doorway. “Look—it’s our house already!”

“Not bad,” Raincloud admiringly told the Elysian. “Your people are most considerate.”

“Oh, the house took care of everything.”

Blackbear’s anger subsided. As usual, his goddess was less particular about interiors than he was. He should be grateful, he realized, for packing and unpacking was the one thing that could drive him and Raincloud to snap at each other. Still, as he went inside to look around, he wondered at the lack of privacy. In Tumbling Rock, no stranger would enter a house unasked.

“The Dark One will need a shrine, though.” Raincloud had located the figure of the Dark Goddess, standing most inappropriately at the rear of the sitting room. The black glazed figure, about half height, had the traditional six arms of the Goddess: her lower two hands held a baby to the breast; her middle two grasped a fanged snake at its head and tail, its midsection caught in the Dark One’s mouth; and her upper two hands lifted overhead in a gesture of the dance, their fingertips aflame.

Alin said, “Just tell your house to push out another room. You’ve not yet filled your quota.”

“Twelve hundred cubic meters is your quota,” said a voice. “Your rooms at present total seventy percent of quota.”

Blackbear gave a start, and looked around.

“I am your dependable housing unit,” said the voice, “manufactured by the Valan House of Chrysolite. If I ever fail you in any way, citizen, please report my defect to...”

Blackbear’s mouth fell open, and a chill reached his toes. He thought, Even our home has a ghost.

From the doorway, Alin observed, “The holostage should connect right here. Let’s have the news,” he called to the house.

A gossamer shell of light appeared in the sitting room, above the holostage. It formed a man, full-size, wearing a talar with cut stones arrayed across his chest. It was the prime minister of Valedon, Shora’s sister world, standing right there in the Windclans’ home. “The Ministry categorically denies this allegation,” the man’s voice boomed, too loud for comfort; Hawktalon clapped her ears. “It is inconceivable that any Valan vessel would violate the recognized space boundary of Urulan, or of any sovereign world. Surely the Free Fold will accept our word, the word of a peace-loving democratic society, over that of a state mired in feudal barbarism—”

“Silence, please,” ordered Raincloud.

The voice ceased, but the speaker remained.

“Valedon used to be feudal enough, a few centuries back,” muttered Raincloud.

A house full of ghosts, thought Blackbear.

The house obligingly tunneled an extra room for the shrine of the Dark One. It also reshaped Hawktalon’s bedroom at her impudent request, giving it a domed ceiling like that of the Temple back home. Then it produced their dinner out of a “window” in the kitchen, roasted goat flesh with potatoes, steaming hot, as if by magic. Before Blackbear even looked for a broom, several servos like large cockroaches came out and sucked all of Sunflower’s crumbs off the floor.

It fascinated him, yet annoyed him, too. “Those servos will try to do your braids next,” he grumbled to Raincloud as he undid his turban and shook out his hair, then slid exhausted into their ready-made bed.

“Nonsense. I’d toss them out, first.” Her arms stretched back amongst the braids, and her breasts rose, as beautifully dark as the rich soil of the Hills. Then she reached up and pulled him over on top of her. Suddenly she was as hungry and desirous as the Dark One devouring the snake. They weren’t quite so exhausted after all, Blackbear decided.

Chapter 2

The next morning, the Windclans were up early for morning prayers to the Dark One. The Goddess Mu, her name too sacred to be uttered, existed in forms infinite in number, smaller than the smallest particle, and ever present. The six-armed form was her favored aspect among humans. Hawktalon lighted the beeswax candles before the polished image, under the watchful eye of her mother. The fragrance of the candles helped Blackbear feel more settled. Perhaps the hand of the Dark One would protect them, even here, so many light-years out from the Hills.

After prayers came rei-gi. The Dark One forbade all instruments of death, but the defensive art of rei-gi helped ward off highwaymen and starving gold miners on the frontier. The main principle of rei-gi was to apply a small force, precisely timed, to deflect an attacker’s thrust and tumble him down.

The house obligingly tucked their furniture into its walls, and Blackbear spread out the mat. The living room was just long enough for one good tumble over the shoulder, ending with a resounding thump of the foot. After the tumbles, over and over, they practiced throws and escapes. Hawktalon was already good enough to toss Blackbear overhead when he caught her from behind, the “Tumbling Rock” move, which gave its name to their home village. Even Sunflower could squiggle out from his mother’s arms when she held him up.

Since rei-gi was designed especially for people carrying children, Blackbear and Raincloud practiced with a twenty-pound sack of beans strapped to the lower back. Hawktalon practiced, too, with a smaller sack. Then Raincloud sat Sunflower behind her hips, in a leather harness designed to protect his head. He laughed with delight as she sparred, unaware of the meticulous training required to keep him safe.

At last Raincloud set out with Hawktalon to meet the mate of the Sub-Subguardian, her supervisor at the Nucleus. “Look, Mum,” exclaimed Hawktalon as she stepped out the door. “There’s Doggie!”

“There’s Doggie!” echoed Sunflower, running outside in his bare feet.

Sure enough, the runaway trainsweep was still there. It had waited all night outside. It was no longer moving, though.

Raincloud frowned. “Didn’t you report it last night, dear?”

“I told the ‘house’” said Blackbear, exasperated. “I hope its owner claims it today.”

“I’m sure they will. At least its power has run down, so it’ll stay put.”

“Excuse me, Citizen,” spoke the house; Blackbear gave a start. “This trainsweep has nearly exhausted its reserve. If it goes out completely, it will require costly retraining.”

“It obviously needs retraining already,” Blackbear muttered.

“Very well, Citizen, that can be arranged—”

“Never mind,” he interrupted, shying at “costly.” “How do I...” His vocabulary failed.

“Recharge it,” completed Raincloud.

An extension cord snaked out of the house and connected to the trainsweep for half a minute. The little servo promptly woke up and jiggled toward them, to Sunflower’s delight. Blackbear felt as foolish as if he had just fed milk to a stray cat.

“You’ll have to take it inside,” said Raincloud, “so it won’t follow us all the way to the Nucleus.”

Hawktalon waved good-bye, walking alongside her mother—a significant concession, Blackbear noted.

With a sigh, Blackbear shooed the trainsweep inside. As it turned out, the little servo kept the two-year-old’s attention while Blackbear spent an hour rearranging furniture and rediscovering packed clothing. He was anxious enough to get started at the Fertility Lab, but he had no idea when the Director would deign to see him. Whatever was her mate Alin to “report” about him? This Elysian social ritual was trying.

“Good morning, Blackbear,” called Alin’s voice, apparently from the sitting room. “Are you there?”

Disconcerted, Blackbear hurried over. There stood the “ghost” of Alin Anaeashon with his train of dead-leaf butterflies, in a column of light upon the holostage where the Valan minister had harangued them the day before.

“I hope you slept well, your first night in Helicon? It will be my highest duty to introduce you today. Tulle wants to show you an exciting discovery in heart development.”

“Thanks,” said Blackbear, collecting himself. This holostage must take incoming calls, like the visiphones in Founders City. “I am eager to get started—”

“Come along, then,” said Alin, “and meet me at the swallowtail garden just outside Science Park.”

Alin’s train made a graceful arc as he swept around, his sandals tapping quietly, their soles curved up in front of the toes. As he shrank away in the distance, the image of his surroundings remained in the column of light. There were tall trees, beautifully sculpted, and what seemed to be thousands of butterflies flitting about them. The sight caught Blackbear’s heart, despite his eagerness to get to work.

A discovery in immortal heart development, that did sound exciting. He quickly packed Sunflower’s diaper bag, reminding himself it was about time for potty training. Then he carried the child out the door, managing to keep the trainsweep inside before the door closed. A sort of squeaking sound emanated from inside; servos squeaked like that, now and then.

Blackbear navigated the street-tunnels between the concave facades, and then the vesicles of the transit reticulum. He could appreciate the “cellular” structure of the city, with its membranelike network of channels, culminating in the central Nucleus. The founders of Helicon, who had created the ageless Elysians, had been doctors from the planet Helix, come to learn molecular biology from the Sharer lifeshapers. The Heliconian Doctors, like their Sharer hosts, had shaped Elysium through biology; and yet, they went much farther. No Sharer could have dreamed of nanoplast.

The avenue leading up to Science Park was wider and taller than the residential street. Upon the radiant skylight giant birds of paradise alternated with the blue shapes of heliconian butterflies. Below, the Elysians passed with their trains like flowing streamers. On a shop windowsill, a medical helicopter set down, bells ringing, and a couple of servos scrambled out. Blackbear wondered who was getting “treated” this time. No Elysian need call a doctor a day’s journey off across the mountain.

A butterfly dipped before him, a large yellow swallowtail with black ribs and rows of blue and red spots. It hovered, then fluttered off ahead. As he walked, there came another, then another.

On his shoulders, Sunflower tried to raise himself higher. “What that, Daddy?”

“That’s a butterfly, Sunny.”

“But-ter-fly,” Sunflower repeated carefully.

Trees rose before him, right up to the sky-ceiling, covered with shimmering butterflies. The scent of blossoms, where the insects sipped nectar, was compelling. The little black-lined tails of the nearer ones seemed to wink at him. Closer, one could see the fat orange-stalked caterpillars devouring the leaves; the trees must require special care.

Beneath the trees, Elysians stood or sat upon crescent-shaped benches of nanoplast. A few conversed quietly, but most simply stared or meditated, seeming lost in thought, as they viewed the butterflies. “Butterfly viewing.” They almost seemed to be praying. Did Elysians have any sense of worship? The Sharers worshiped their entire ocean as a Goddess. Clickers served the Dark One; but could She reach here, across the light years, Blackbear wondered uneasily.

He caught sight of Alin at last, staring up at the trees. Alin wore a talar of pale green, bordered again with anaean leafwings. His train and trainsweeps were missing. At first he did not quite see Blackbear; then he looked up, as if emerging from a dream. “I still wonder, what it would have been like,” Alin said in a low voice. “I had a chance, you know, to visit Helix....”

Blackbear blinked at him. The planet Helix had been destroyed, nine centuries before.

Alin’s gaze sharpened. “Excuse me, Doctor Windclan. I trust you slept well, your first night in Helicon? Do you enjoy the garden? The swallowtails are my favorite, I must confess. In Helicon, of course, heliconians are favored. They’re the longest lived of the lepidoptera, and the original emblem of our people. ‘Elysian’ is an old misreading of ‘Helishon.’” He smiled apologetically. “Words interest me. I’m a logen, after all.”

A logen was a sort of public philosopher. The logens, Raincloud said, were inspired by the “wordweavers” of The Web, a Sharer classic.

Sunflower dug a foot into Blackbear’s chest. Wincing, Blackbear gave in and let the child down to toddle off.

“Is your shonling registered, now?” Alin asked, his gaze following the child curiously.

Blackbear nodded. “The house took care of it.” The house seemed to know everything, serving almost as a surrogate family. With a pang, he suddenly missed all his brothers and sisters again. It was more than he could bear; even the secret of immortality might not be worth a year of loneliness.

“And you gave birth to him yourself.”

“Not myself.” Blackbear chuckled. “The ‘goddess’ gives birth; the man nurtures.”

“Of course, I’ve seen Tulle’s capuchins give birth. Tulle raises all sorts of rare creatures from dead worlds, in her preserve in Meryllion. Still, that would be something to give birth to a human child, however defective.”

Blackbear frowned. His toddler was considered “defective” here because he would age and die. “Are Elysians never born defective?” he asked suddenly. “Does the embryo treatment ‘take’ every time?” Medicine was rarely perfect.

“Ninety percent. The rest are unbalanced, somehow; they die of premature aging, within the first year. Much of Tulle’s research aims to reduce that. But the embryo treatment is amazingly efficient, when you think of it, all the thousand-odd genes to be modified within a single fertilized egg.”

Ninety percent... One in ten infants died? The idea shook him. He must have seen that figure before, but somehow it had not sunk in.

Alin eyed him quizzically, and Blackbear realized he had missed the Elysian’s last remark. “Excuse me?”

“Just a suggestion. Every shon has a visitor’s program, to teach our children cultural diversity. They’d be delighted to accept yours for a year or two. Think of it: the best education in the Free Fold.”

Blackbear thought of it, and he nearly passed out. Just to imagine Sunflower out of sight was impossible. “No thanks,” he forced himself to say. How could he ever explain to this perplexing immortal? Amongst the turbulent Caldera Hills, when any moment might be one’s last, it was a comfort to know that one’s last would always be spent in the arms of those one loved.

“Won’t you tell me about yourself?” Alin gestured toward one of the half-moon-shaped benches, near the pavilion. A servo with a tray came out, bringing tea and delicacies shaped in extravagant forms of birds and ocean creatures. “Tulle will want to know all about you. Tell me, Blackbear, what do you do for excitement, on your world?”

How long would Tulle’s mate keep him here, he wondered. “Excitement?” he muttered vaguely. “Three volcanoes overlook Tumbling Rock, one extinct, but one never knows. We have earthquakes, about once a month. We all run outside and try to guess how many houses will stay up.”

“You’re an outdoorsman! You’ll get along with the L’liite student in Tulle’s lab; he actually lives outside, on a raft on the ocean,” Alin said with a slight shudder. “Tulle and I rarely leave the cities. It’s too much bother, with all the medics you have to take along.”

A L’liite student—then he would not be the only foreigner in the lab, Blackbear thought with relief. L’li was the planet from whence the first Clickers had emigrated, two centuries ago, when Bronze Sky was terraformed and settled.

“Your mate,” Alin added, “is she an outdoorsman, too?”

Blackbear was trying to locate Sunflower, who was exploring beneath the next table. This garden had no children’s corner. “Raincloud serves the Dark Goddess at the Temple. She has borne two children. She is fluent in five languages,” he concluded with a touch of pride.

“She’s the Urulite translator, yes?” Alin sipped his tea. “Urulite experts are scarce.”

“Yes. The Prime Guardian recruited her, but now she’s only to work for a Sub-Subguardian.” The Prime Guardian chaired the Guard of Twelve, representing Elysium’s twelve cities.

“You mean Sub-Subguardian Verid Anaeashon? Well, better a rising star than a setting one.”

That was a thought. He would tell Raincloud her supervisor was called a “rising star.”

Sunflower finally gave up trying to catch a butterfly and tiptoed back to his father. “Read book,” he clicked, his hands leaving damp marks on Blackbear’s shirt. “Read book now.”

Alin watched curiously. “The child makes such delightful noises.”

“That is our language,” Blackbear explained self-consciously. “Click-click is spoken only by our people.” Clickers had been a rural religious minority on L’li; they remained a minority on Bronze Sky.

Sunflower climbed up his father’s leg and settled himself in his lap. “Book, now.”

Alin leaned forward confidentially. “Now that we know each other better,” the logen said, “tell me something; I’ve always wanted to ask a ‘parent’ of children.”

“Yes?”

“What do you think of compassion?”

His mouth fell open. “Compassion” was an Elysian word he vaguely recalled from the lexicon.

“You know what The Web teaches, about compassion,” Alin went on. “Of course nowadays, different readers teach differently; but The Web itself speaks plainly, I think. Do you believe compassion is a virtue, or is it a form of selfishness, in fact the deadliest of all desires?”

Blackbear had never read the Sharer classic, although of course Raincloud had. Maybe he had better, if these Elysians made such a deal of it. Why this riddle game—would they never let him get to work? Meanwhile, Sunflower was squirming insistently, and Blackbear caught a distinctive odor from his diaper. “Please excuse me.”

He escaped to a nearby pavilion, where he changed the child’s diaper and, to make up for the lack of storybooks, recounted the folktale about the rabbit who longed for wings.

When they emerged, a hovercraft had set down in the garden, and a couple of servo medics were attending someone. People had gathered round to look, talking excitedly. Alin stood at a more respectful distance. “He slipped and twisted an ankle,” Alin explained. “The medics want to do a scan on it, to make sure it’s okay. Only two legs to last a millennium.”

“Or longer,” Blackbear graciously responded. “For the ‘immortals,’ who knows?”

Alin’s look changed, and for a moment his face darkened. “The oldest of us has barely reached a thousand. Even ten thousand years would be just a speck of time.”

Taken aback, Blackbear tried to frame an apology; but the Elysian had already regained his composure. “Let’s be going, shall we? Ordinarily, I entertain Tulle’s students for two days, but I know foreigners are always anxious to get started.” Alin stopped at the pavilion for his train of leaf-winged butterflies which he had left there with those of the other Elysians. His own four trainsweeps recognized him instantly, springing up and scurrying out behind him.

They strode down the cavernous street-tunnel, coming at last to Science Park, the oldest laboratory in Elysium, the birthplace of immortality. A long, sloping ramp curved around, melding into the concave facade. Nowhere in Elysium had Blackbear seen a stairway; with good reason, he realized. Alin’s train swung neatly around the ramp as he ascended, kept in order by his trainsweeps.

At the top of the ramp, a sheer face of marble stood before them. There was no sign of an entrance, save for an arch of illuminated inscription, whose sense Blackbear tried to puzzle out. Something like, Where learning is shared, the waters break through... Perhaps that was, the waterfall breaks through the cataract.

Beneath the inscription a cleft formed in the “marble,” like an embryonic cell dividing in two. The cleft molded itself out into a doorway, a fancy one with fluted trim and an ornamental arch.

“Door, Daddy, door.” Sunflower bounced happily on his shoulders. A magic doorway was no stranger for him than anything else in life.

“Yes, a door,” said Blackbear. “But don’t fly down, now,” he warned the child.

A column of warm air met his face, like a summer wind except for a faint medicinal odor. Elysian interiors were kept too warm for Blackbear’s taste. Alin removed his train for the servo arm which slithered unnervingly out from the wall. The walls of the hallway were plain, save for panels of blinking lights that made Sunflower stretch out a hand and cluck with interest.

From the ceiling, positioned as if to greet all who entered, hung a holographic display. It showed an animal, like a transparent snake with its hollow gut tube visible, undulating sinusoidally. The image must be magnified, for only a microscopic organism would look so transparent. A worm, a nematode perhaps; he could just distinguish the individual cells of its intestine. The worm traced an S, over and over again.

A female Elysian approached: at last, the Director, Tulle Meryllishon. More than five hundred years old, with the figure of an adolescent, her long blond hair hung straight as a waterfall to her shoulders, where a single clasp at her right held up her loose-fitting gown. The border of her talar flashed a pair of metalmarks, pink wings with metallic black edges.

Up the talar scampered a live monkey, a capuchin with its hood of black fur. Reaching the Director’s shoulder, the capuchin twined its tail and blinked at Blackbear.

Alin bowed to his mate. “My duty is fulfilled. Doctor Windclan meets our highest expectations.”

“Yes, yes, thanks,” Tulle replied, bowing with a smile. “I shall call on your mate at the earliest opportunity, Blackbear.” She followed his gaze to the display of the magnified worm. “Do you recognize our friend up there? Caenorhabditis elegans, the first organism in which a gene for aging and fertility was discovered. This specimen was a mutant which lived twice as long as wild-type, but produced only a fifth as many eggs. The mutant gene was known on Torr, in the pre-interstellar era. Today, we know a thousand such genes—in humans. And yet...” She looked back over her shoulder.

A man and a goddess were approaching, too tall and large-boned to be Elysian. “Here are the people who really run the lab,” Tulle explained. “Our students, Onyx and Draeg. The Elysian students will send their mates to see you tomorrow.”

Draeg was the L’liite “outdoorsman” Alin had mentioned. A tall fellow with unruly auburn hair, well developed in the shoulders, Draeg wore a rough knee-length tunic, his legs bare. He would have made a scandal in Tumbling Rock, in front of the goddesses; what if one demanded his favors?

Unconcerned, Draeg grinned and patted Sunflower on the head. “That’s some kid you’ve got, Brother,” he said in L’liite, a language Blackbear knew well. Bronze Skyans all spoke L’liite, for most of their ancestors had emigrated from crowded L’li.

“A sweetheart,” agreed Onyx, the senior student, a goddess from Valedon. She raised a hand to touch Sunflower, who in turn reached for the flashing red stone hung at her neck. Her ringers were webbed in between; Blackbear tried not to stare, intrigued though he was by this sign of Sharer ancestry. Intermarriage between the twin worlds must be common. “Watch out, little imp,” Onyx told Sunflower, “or Tulle will nab you for the Preserve.”

“Hey, don’t scare him off,” Draeg protested. “Just when we need the help.”

“Of course not.” Onyx touched his arm. “I’ve been here the longest; any machines you need to get working, just ask.”

Blackbear smiled bravely.

“Come along,” beckoned Tulle, “we must show you Draeg’s latest discovery. You recall the heartless gene? This new heartless mutant develops an ageless heart, yet it makes fertile gonads, too.”

The first heartless mutants had failed to develop hearts, but this one must be a subtler change. And the secondary effect on the gonads was most interesting. Developmental genes rarely had a single function; rather, they acted on different body parts at different stages.

“I can’t wait to get started,” Blackbear told the Director as they walked down the corridor, passing doors that appeared and disappeared disconcertingly. “Must I really only work three days a week?” The Elysian “Right of Visitation,” which restricted the work week, seemed a pointless hindrance.

Tulle laughed, as if he had told a good joke.

“As a foreigner,” Onyx explained, “you can get an extra work day if you cite ‘religious law.’ It does help pay the bills.”

Draeg intoned, “We are all most religious, around here.”

Onyx gave a low chuckle. “The cost of living’s notorious in Helicon. But Foreign Affairs set you up, didn’t they?”

At that moment Sunflower was attempting to fly down from his shoulder and enter a door that had just appeared. Fortunately, the door turned out to be their destination at last.

The room contained a simple holostage without control panels. “The servo simulates development of the embryo,” Tulle told him. “Most longevity genes also play key roles in early development—and heartless is no exception.”

“Lights down,” ordered Draeg. The room darkened. “It’ll work this time, you’ll see.”

“The central servo came back with a brand new program,” said Onyx. “It had better work.”

“That new program’s just what I’m afraid of.” Draeg barked some more commands.

An image appeared, fully dimensional, about one meter tall, of a human embryo. The squarish bulb of a head was tucked under, while the limbless back section with its track of somites curled upward, ending in a pointed tail. Through the bulge of the heart, blood pulsed rhythmically.

He watched as if transfixed. The detail was breathtaking, clear enough for him to count the somites. About six or seven weeks, he guessed; the living embryo would be smaller than a fingernail.

“Let’s look at the heart,” said Tulle. “Focus in.”

Draeg spoke again to the servo. The bulging heart grew larger until it filled the stage. Its twisted tube of tissue had already ballooned into ventricles and auricles.

Tulle explained, “We can test any model by simulation. We can mix and match different alleles for each gene, and see what the model predicts. This model predicts both an ageless heart and fertile germ cells.”

Blackbear nodded. “How can you tell?”

“You can’t, at this level,” said Draeg. “You have to go subcellular.” He addressed the holostage again, this time interrupted by Onyx.

“I don’t think you want to do that,” Onyx warned. “If I were you, I’d try...” Blackbear was lost.

The image wavered and shuddered. Then it burst into a snow of light. The room went completely dark.

“Damn. Reset, will you?” came Draeg’s voice. “I said, reset.”

A whimper, then a sob, came from Sunflower. Then the child broke down altogether. “Light out,” he sobbed. “Light!”

Blackbear took the child down and tried to comfort him, The door reappeared, filling the room with light from the corridor. Still, it was no use; the child had had a long day. He had missed his nap, Blackbear realized.

“You must have overloaded the program,” Onyx was telling Draeg over Sunflower’s screaming.

“But that’s what we sent it out to fix,” said Draeg.

“Sh,” said Tulle with a stern wave of her hand. “The shonling—can’t you see he’s in trouble?”

Sunflower was still racked with sobs, his little chest heaving in and out. “Poor dear,” agreed Onyx, patting his shoulder.

From outside, bells rang. A panel opened in the wall, and the medic hovercraft appeared.

Blackbear’s mouth fell open, and he held the child close. “It’s all right,” he exclaimed. “We don’t need any ‘care.’”

Tulle eyed him closely, then she nodded. “It’s all right, off with you,” she called out to the emerging servos.

“Get lost, metalmen!” added Draeg.

“Sh, Draeg,” said Onyx.

“They’re just machines. Can’t I get out some frustration?”

“I don’t know,” said Onyx uneasily. “Those servos make me wonder sometimes.”

The medics had left by then, and Sunflower was rocking to sleep in Blackbear’s arms.

“Machines,” muttered Draeg. “You’ve got to get away from them. That’s why I live outside on a Sharer raft. Cheaper, too.”

Onyx ran a diagnostic series on the controls, calling one unintelligible command after another, with occasional input from Tulle. At last the living fetal image returned.

“It is beautiful,” Blackbear said at last. “Where do you take it next?”

“We’ll test our model in vivo,” said Tulle at last. “Not in humans; not just yet.”

Onyx said, “We’ll test it in the simian hybrid first. The Elysian students culture the simian embryos. You’ll meet them tomorrow.”

Draeg frowned fiercely and looked away. Of course, Blackbear thought, there would have to be testing in humans.

Chapter 3

It was well past six when Blackbear got home. The door to the apartment oozed open at the sight of him. With a sigh he swung Sunflower down; thumb in mouth, the child curled up on the floor, half asleep. The imprisoned trainsweep scurried over, but for once the child took no notice.

A column of light remained above the holostage, just as before he had left that morning.

“Raincloud?”

No one answered. Raincloud and Hawktalon must still be out. Why would the holostage be on? It still displayed the butterfly garden where Alin had called. “Goddess—did I leave it running all day? House,” he called in Elysian, “why didn’t you turn that off when we left?”

“If I failed to hear your request, Citizen, please report my defect to—”

“Never mind. Please turn it off, now. How many credits did it cost?”

The holostage went dark. “No cost.”

That was right; he had received the call from Alin. Relieved, he took a step toward the kitchen.

The sitting room—something had changed. The far wall, where Blackbear had removed the figure of the Dark One, now contained a wide blank panel with a frame that reached from floor to ceiling. What was this? It was unlike Raincloud to redecorate.

As he moved closer, the panel came to life with an ocean scene. Great white-tipped waves rolled in the distance, and the roar of the spray shook his feet. The image was so designed that as he moved, the view in the “window” moved with him, just like a real ocean in the distance outside a window.

“Greetings,” spoke the window. “I am a climate window, a greeting-gift from Citizen Alin Anaeashon, mate of Citizen Tulle Meryllishon. Please choose your view. I have many selections: sunrise and sunset, of twenty types; snowcapped mountains, sunlit or rain, eighteen varieties; plains with stampeding herds of ten different exotic animals; volcanoes, gentle or explosive...”

Blackbear shook his head in amazement, as the list droned on with the rolling waves.

“... Citizen Alin Anaeashon hopes that I prove pleasing to an outdoorsman like yourself. If not, I may be returned or exchanged at The Golden Fritillary for six hundred credits. Please choose your view.”

A touching gesture, thought Blackbear, recalling Tulle’s mate with some warmth. But what if he had to reciprocate? Where would he get that kind of cash?

He returned to the kitchen. “Sunflower, what do you want for dinner?”

“Grill-cheese,” came a sleepy voice.

The “kitchen,” too, was a talking window where things appeared—real food, at least. If only the “climate window” in the sitting room could provide real mountain grass, too, he would feel much better.

“House?” he called. “May we please have two servings of grilled cheese?” He could have had himself a good steak, he realized, but he was too tired to bother changing the order. Raincloud still had not come home; she would be cross from traveling so late past dinner.

“What kind of cheese, Citizen?”

“Goat cheese.”

“We have two hundred varieties of goat cheese, from five different planets—”

“Just plain goat cheese.” He waved his hand aimlessly. “The local brand. Same for the bread.” He frowned to himself. Where would the housing unit store two hundred varieties of goat cheese?

“Local butter, too?”

The climate window in the sitting room was talking again, asking Sunflower to choose a view. Sunflower watched mesmerized, tracing the surface of the ocean waves with his right hand. His other hand pulled absently at his left ear.

The child was prone to infections of the middle ear. Concerned, Blackbear pulled out his otoscope and peered inside both of Sunflower’s ears. Each ear contained a healthy pink cavern of little hairs, surrounding the pearly disk of the eardrum.

“A visitor, Citizen,” intoned the house.

Blackbear jumped up and went to the door. There stood a blond goddess in a pink gown and train bordered with swallowtails; a Papilishon. Behind her, the sky-ceiling had darkened. Blackbear wished he had checked first; it was unwise to be seen with a strange goddess after dark.

“Greetings,” she said. “My apologies; I’ve come at last for my mate’s trainsweep. Thanks so much for reporting it.”

The runaway trainsweep was still there, all right, just inside the sitting room. It immediately scurried back to the bedrooms.

Blackbear breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m so sorry for the trouble; I did my best, you know—”

“Oh, no, the fault is ours entirely. We ordered a new brand of trainsweeps; we should have stuck with the Chrysolite House as usual. Is there anything we can do for you? My mate, you know, is a Helishon of nine hundred years. He’d love to show you the city; he knows all our history, from the day the Heliconian Doctors landed.”

“Thanks, I’ll remember.” Blackbear realized he had been right at first, after all; the trainsweep’s owner, with the free-flowing hair, had been a man.

Blackbear went and dug out the trainsweep, which he found hiding beneath Sunflower’s bed. Despite himself, he felt sorry for the machine. Was he going crazy? He would never get used to this place.

The Elysian goddess sighed. “I’ll have it retrained.” She bent over and pressed something beneath the machine’s underside. Its gentle humming died. Another trainsweep left her train to come over and hitch the runaway to its back, then returned to its position behind her. She bowed. “My mate will hear glowing reports of you. And remember, if you ever want a tour...” She turned to go, her train sweeping around forming a wide half-moon.

“Doggie!” wailed Sunflower from behind his father’s legs. “I want Doggie...”

“Sh, dear; dinner must be ready.” But the child was inconsolable. Completely worn out, he would not eat his dinner; it was all Blackbear could do to sing him to sleep in his darkened bedroom. The child’s head nestled on his shoulder, its scent sweeter than perfume. In the darkness thoughts of the day past whirled in his head, the giant embryo looming in the shadows with its ageless heart. Where learning is shared, the waterfall breaks through.... This work would be even more exciting than he had hoped.

Footsteps sounded faintly outside the room. Raincloud and Hawktalon were home at last. Blackbear gently laid Sunflower in his bed and adjusted a pillow on the floor in case he rolled out, for he had only just switched from the crib.

In the kitchen, Raincloud sat at the table looking tired. Blackbear gave her a good hug and massaged her shoulders. “You must have had quite a day. What can I get for you?”

She shrugged. “How about veal stuffed with mushrooms and water chestnuts.” Raincloud had taken advantage of this “kitchen” in no time. How did it ever prepare things so fast? he wondered. It was fine for now, but he hoped she would not be spoiled for his own cooking back home.

“And you?” he asked Hawktalon, wrestling her arm.

“Mm—how about chocolate marble cake with ice cream?”

“She’s been eating ice cream all day.” Raincloud sounded exasperated.

“Ice cream?” Blackbear asked. “At the Nucleus?”

“We never got to the Nucleus.”

“Never? What happened?”

“We toured the entertainment district all day with Iras.”

Iras Letheshon was the mate of Sub-Subguardian Verid Anaeashon. Verid’s mate was not a man but a goddess like herself. Such pairings were common among Elysians, between men as well. Blackbear could see it for goddesses, but he found it hard to imagine a man worshiping another man.

“The circus, the arcade, the swallowtail garden,” Raincloud ticked off her fingers. “Iras said the Sub-Subguardian was booked solid all day, with one ambassador or another.”

Hawktalon wandered off into the sitting room. The climate window introduced itself and commenced its catalogue of views.

Blackbear relayed Raincloud’s request for veal to the house, making it a double order. “That’s a shame,” he sympathized. “These Elysians are a chatty lot. You’d think they’ve got nothing better to do.”

“Iras had plenty to do. She’s a loan officer for Bank Helicon; she kept getting calls the whole time, to finance solar power satellites on L’li and servo factories on Valedon. A servo warned her now and then about Visiting Hours.”

Blackbear grinned. If Elysium was famous for one thing, it was banking. Where else could you pay back a loan over two centuries? “Well, I’m sure the Sub-Subguardian will see you tomorrow,” he said. “Alin called her a ‘rising star.’”

Raincloud stared thoughtfully, then nodded. “Iras said the same.”

The veal was as good as it smelled. He savored each forkful, thinking that onions and garlic might make it even better next time.

A thunderous roar shook the floor beneath their feet. An earthquake? Blackbear leaped to his feet, and Raincloud ran out to fetch Sunflower to safety.

But there was no “safety,” trapped as they were in this sphere of a city. For that matter, how could there be an earthquake?

In the sitting room, the climate window displayed a massive volcanic eruption, complete with chunks blasting out of the mountainside and red lava spraying into the sky. Hawktalon had her hands clapped over her ears, jumping with glee, her beads dancing around her head.

“Quiet,” he yelled.

The room was silenced. The window display continued its lurid eruptions, giving viewers the unnerving sense of flying in an airplane right overhead. “How dare you, Hawk,” he exclaimed. “You’ll wake your little brother.”

She giggled. “I only did what it told me, Daddy. ‘Please choose your view.’”

Raincloud came in, cradling Sunflower. “That’s not half-bad,” she said, admiring the window. “Does it do earthquakes, too?”

“Earthquakes of ten kinds, Citizen, and three tidal waves,” said the window.

“What a great idea for earthquake drills. We must keep the kids in shape, after all.” She settled in the chair and undid her breastflap for Sunflower to nurse.

“We can’t keep this gift,” Blackbear told her. “It cost six hundred credits. How could we reciprocate?”

“They won’t expect such expense from us. They think we’re dirt poor. Besides, we’ll have to entertain Alin here; he’ll see if you kept it.” She thought it over. “Still, it would dishonor our clan not to reciprocate. I’ll come up with something.”

After Sunflower dozed off, Raincloud beckoned Hawktalon to come up for a token sip. Then, looking up at Blackbear, she added mischievously, “Your turn.”

“I’ll have mine later,” he returned with a smile. He was feeling better, settling in; they were still a family, even so far from their clan.

He watched Raincloud soaping her back and arms before bed, a truly divine sight. “I should redo your braids again.”

“Tomorrow, let’s plan on it. You can do Hawktalon’s, too. I’ll make sure I get home earlier.” She frowned; something was on her mind. “Blackbear... I think they want me to leave Hawktalon home.”

His fingers tightened. “Did they say that?”

“Iras didn’t say, but you know, I can read people.” Raincloud got out of the bath, and Blackbear wrapped a towel around her. “Iras kept on talking about her shon, and how Hawktalon would enjoy it with all their activities.”

He clasped her arms. “I wouldn’t let her near a shon.”

Raincloud turned her head and regarded him curiously. “Really? The shon is supposed to be a model nursery, not that I believe in nurseries. But one day a week wouldn’t hurt. They enroll foreign visitors free of charge; it’s considered a ‘cultural experience’ for their children.”

“I wouldn’t trust them. All of us foreigners are ‘defective,’ remember.” He paused. “And what about you? How would you get on without her?”

“I went to class alone, when she was little,” Raincloud reminded him. “You couldn’t bear to part with her. You took her to anatomy lab, where she drank formalin one day.”

“Only a taste,” he muttered, wincing at the recollection. “Well, I’ll take her with me again. She wants to see my lab, after all.”

“Are you sure? What will your Director say?”

“Tulle won’t mind. That Science Park is full of foreigners. They adored Sunflower.”

Raincloud nodded. “Elysium runs on cheap foreign labor.”

“We’ll give it a try.”

She flashed him a smile. Still, it saddened him to think of her alone in this bizarre city, without even a friendly little pair of eyes to share the view.

In the morning Raincloud left to meet Iras again, and Blackbear set off for Science Park with both children. Hawktalon skipped ahead gaily in anticipation.

At the laboratory, Tulle was out for her Visiting Day, showing Alin’s colleagues about town, Onyx explained. Onyx and Draeg were delighted to see Hawktalon, and they offered to put her to work on the spot. “She’s a beauty,” added Draeg, nudging Blackbear in the arm. “My little sister back home is just her age.” Onyx, who as senior student had the best lab space, had already cleared out a place by her desk for Sunflower to play. Draeg had purchased a rattle and a toy servo from a tourist shop.

Blackbear was deeply touched. This place was already feeling like home.

They worked all morning at the embryo program, trying to fix the bug at the cellular level. Onyx kept shouting “I’ve got it!” and they seemed to make progress, though after two hours the program still overloaded. Draeg swore his head off like an angry goddess. Disconcerted, Blackbear knew that a man would never dare talk like that in Tumbling Rock.

“What do you expect to see inside the mutant cells?” Blackbear asked. “What makes the heart tissue immortal?”

“A new protein appears,” Draeg explained. “This protein scavenges oxygen radicals whose damage accumulates over time. It will prevent heart failure up to eight or nine hundred years.”

“Eight or nine hundred years? What happens after that?”

“Who knows?” said Onyx. “The Helishon itself has only existed a thousand years.”

Blackbear nodded. “A thousand years without aging—that sounds immortal, to me.”

Draeg and Onyx exchanged glances. Onyx said, “We never say ‘immortal,’ only ‘ageless.’ Most Elysians who escape accident will make it to a thousand, but a small percentage won’t. Nothing’s perfect. And in the future, say, by the year ten thousand, who knows?”

“I see.” Blackbear considered this. So the Elysians had their “defectives,” too.

Draeg chuckled. “Who do you think pays our salaries?”

“‘Death pays a good wage,’ as the Sharers say,” quoted Onyx. “The Guard pays our salaries, of course, to work on longevity. Tulle manages a dozen students, scattered around Science Park. Only the three of us emphasize fertility, an offshoot of her main project. You’ll probably look at egg cell development; that’s hot right now. The Fertility Project attracts foreign students.”

“The Guardians,” said Draeg, “are all quincentenarians at least. For them, we’re the Longevity Project.”

“That’s right,” she teased, shoving Draeg in the arm, “Draeg just loves those Elysians; wants to help them live longer.”

Draeg gave her a dirty look. “As you said, it’s all related.”

Blackbear smiled. “It’s fascinating, but I still find it hard to see why aging and fertility are so inextricable.”

Onyx said, “Remember the nematode—long life, fewer eggs? Evolution picks genes that make more eggs, early on, at the expense of later lifespan. It’s inevitable.”

“Still...” Blackbear wished he could put into words what troubled him.

“I have a hard time with that one, myself,” Onyx admitted. “Ask Tulle.”

They broke for coffee in the lounge, where a service window overlooked a small garden of heliconians feeding at passionflowers, their scent filtering in. By the service window, a holostage displayed two Elysians seated within its column of light. One wore the motif of dead-leaf butterflies.

Blackbear stared at the illuminated ghosts. “Say, that’s Alin.”

Alin was speaking calmly to the other man, who was tall for an Elysian, draped in royal blue heliconians. “Is it not the case that Bank Helicon financed the construction of interstellar missiles for Valedon? And perhaps some of those missiles found their way to Urulan, as well? What will the Sharers say, I wonder.”

“We violated no clause of the Sharer treaty,” said the man in the blue heliconians.

Alin nodded. “The Sharers would say, ‘Let one fleshborer devour another.’ Where does that place us, I wonder.”

The man looked tight in the face, and his hands gripped the sides of his chair.

At Blackbear’s shoulder Onyx explained, “It’s a logathlon, a sort of trial by words. In public, of course. The defendant is the president of Bank Helicon.”

A burst of applause came from an unseen audience. Blackbear remembered that Verid’s mate Iras worked for Bank Helicon; Raincloud would be interested.

“The audience will vote in the end,” added Onyx.

Draeg looked over. “Those logens are all Anaeashon. Alin’s okay, but some others cause us no end of trouble.” He tapped his knuckles on the service window. “Tea for three, metalman.”

Onyx frowned and snapped her fingerwebs. “Wait till you get home to L’li and find yourself talking like that to your father.”

Draeg laughed. “That will be the day. Where I come from, a man gets respect. You don’t take crap from Elysians.”

Blackbear wondered at this. He had found Elysians reasonably respectful, in their own odd way. He watched Hawktalon approach the window, grasp it with her hands, and pull herself up. “Chocolate marble cake, with ice cream on top,” she said in impeccable Elysian.

His mouth opened to speak, but he thought better of it. Raincloud would have to have a talk with the girl; it was better for a goddess to discipline young goddesses.

“Newsbreak,” announced the holostage. The scene in the column of light had shifted. “Sharers at Papilion seek to ban motor-driven boats. The underwater noise of the boats drowns out the long-distance sonic communications of their giant starworms....”

Two Elysian students he had not yet met entered the lounge. “Students,” of course, might be anywhere up to fiftyish in age; Elysians took their time about education. Blackbear rose automatically for introductions, but they walked past him, the man skipping to touch the ceiling.

“Good morning, Pirin,” said Onyx.

Pirin bowed with a flourish. “Good morning, Onyx. It is my highest duty to see you, as always. I hope the program for your heart model is running better?”

“Oh, it’s just about there,” Onyx said with a hopeful grin.

“Our new simbrid clone looks very promising,” Pirin offered.

The other student, a goddess, clapped her hands. “We can’t wait to try out your predictions in the simbrid embryo.”

Simbrid, or simian hybrid embryos, were bred from several primate strains to reach a pattern of development which closely matched the human. Any finding from the model program had to be tested in the simbrid before applying it to human embryos.

Pirin told Onyx, “Our mates will be taking the new student to lunch today.” Presumably he meant Blackbear, whom he was unprepared to address until introduced by his mate.

“A good arrangement,” said Onyx. “He will meet them with pleasure.”

The two Elysians went to the window to order tea.

Draeg stood and stretched. “Time’s wasting—let’s have another go at that program before lunch.”

They left the lounge. Onyx’s sandals scraped softly on the nanoplastic floor.

“That Pirin,” muttered Draeg. “Thinks just because he’s a Helishon he’s God’s gift,” he finished in L’liite.

“Come on, Draeg,” objected Onyx. “They’re just kids, barely out of the shon; they take everything seriously. Give ‘em a couple of centuries, they’ll loosen up like Tulle.”

“Pardon me, I haven’t the time.”

“If you’d knock that chip off your shoulder, maybe they’d loosen up sooner. Don’t mind them,” Onyx told Blackbear. “After your lunch with their mates, they’ll be perfectly civil. You see, if you were Elysian, and they spoke to you without introduction by your mate or theirs, it would be the worst possible insult.”

Blackbear nodded. “It’s something like that, in the Hills. If you approach a man without asking his goddess, you might be shunned.”

The L’liite eyed him skeptically. “What sort of man needs the word of a female?”

“It’s for our own protection,” Blackbear assured him. A man who lost his honor might as well leave the Hills forever.

“Protection! Have you no strength of your own?”

“A man is built strong, to carry the children,” Blackbear said. “The ‘goddess’ bears them one at a time; the man carries them all.”

Draeg grinned. “Say, I like that. Blackbear, you’re all right, and your kids are the greatest.” He put a playful armlock around Hawktalon.

The girl caught Draeg’s hands, while bending her knees slightly. She took a deep bow forward, and Draeg somersaulted over her onto the floor.

“Hawktalon!” Blackbear cried, adding in Click-click, “You might hurt someone. You will definitely talk with your mother.”

“But Mother taught me to.”

Rubbing his elbow, Draeg scrambled to his feet. He was not at all displeased. “Where’d you learn that, you little devil? We’ve got some sparring to do.”

The Elysian students’ mates treated Blackbear to a lively luncheon at a nearby pavilion, complete with acrobats who tossed juggling pins across the tables and would have tossed Sunflower, too, if Blackbear had not fetched him back at the last moment. Although the skin of the young Elysians could scarcely be smoother than that of their elders, their youth was unmistakable in their spontaneity and careless laughter; they made Blackbear, with his two children to keep his heart on edge, feel old. Outside, of course, the Elysians were marked by their trains, the length of which increased a meter for each century of life.

Upon his return, Pirin and Lorl greeted him with enthusiasm and pressed upon him several reports of their work, which he stacked in the growing “to read” pile on his new desk. Then Onyx rounded up everyone for a surprise conference with Tulle, who had managed to slip away from her visiting duties for an illicit conference with the lab.

Draeg was worried. “Working on Visiting Day—she could end up in the Palace of Rest for a month.”

“That’s why we’re meeting her outside the lab, at the swallowtail garden,” said Onyx.

“The walls have ears. The servos will tattle.”

The five of them, along with three other students whom Blackbear did not yet know, met Tulle in the same garden where he had met Alin. Tulle’s capuchin scampered to the floor; Hawktalon and Sunflower were soon in hot pursuit. The lab talk flew thick and fast, quite over his head.

“Blackbear?” Tulle was addressing him. “What do you think of the new egg gene? Would the project interest you?”

He swallowed and tried to think of something to say. Draeg observed, “He’s only just arrived.”

“He’s got some good questions, though.” Onyx nudged him. “Ask Tulle what you asked us, this morning.”

“Well—” He hoped he could frame the question so as not to sound foolish. “I just wondered, why is there such a tight link between fertility and aging? If the Heliconian Doctors were smart enough to beat aging, why couldn’t they unlink the functions of fertility?” The answer had to be obvious; he wished he had not asked.

There was silence. Heads turned toward Tulle, but she looked around at the group.

Pirin waved his hand. “The evolutionary link is too fundamental. For example, the int gene is needed for spermatogenesis, but it also functions in the central nervous system. The int alleles which yield the highest sperm count happen to cause aging of the brain. A thousand genes like that have evolved, enhancing fertility in youth but linked to aging. To reengineer that is as daunting a task as, say, making lungs into gills.”

“That’s been done, hasn’t it?” someone asked. “The Sharers shaped themselves to breathe water. That’s why the Heliconian Doctors first came here to learn from them.”

“The Sharers did a lot, but not that,” corrected Onyx. “Sharers get some oxygen through their skin, from the microbes that turn them purple; but even they can’t breathe water forever.”

“That doesn’t prove it can’t be done.”

A heated discussion ensued, ending with the students falling silent one by one and looking at Tulle.

Tulle spoke at last, oddly reluctant. “The truth is, we have no clear answer to Blackbear’s question. The records of the Heliconian Doctors who made the first ageless humans were lost after the Fall.”

The Fall of Torr. Once humanity’s birthplace, Torr had been consumed by its own machines. The machine-world then sent its rule to all living words, and death to those who would not obey. When the planet Helix learned to jump the space folds, cheating the speed of light, their first jumpship brought an end to Torr.

But their ship was too late. Ten years after, at near-lightspeed, came Torr’s last ship of death. The Fall of Torr meant the Fall of Helix, too. Thus, Shora’s Heliconians became orphans, amid a chaos of awakened worlds tasting their first freedom.

Onyx shuddered. “I can’t imagine what life was like before the Free Fold.”

“Sure you can,” said Draeg. “Just visit Urulan, and watch them nuke their rebel provinces.”

“But what do you think, Tulle?” Onyx persisted. “Why are the ageless infertile? You must have an opinion.”

“My own belief,” Tulle said carefully, “is that the Doctors did not try too hard. They did not deliberately suppress fertility; they didn’t have to, given the natural link with aging.”

Silence again. Lorl nodded slowly. “It’s interesting, you know. Only the reproductive functions are defunct in our bodies, not the sexual ones. That is, we lack wombs and eggs, but our sexual response is normal.”

“Better,” corrected Pirin succinctly. “Males retain the potency we reach at age eighteen.”

At that, Draeg made a crude hand sign at him. “The butterfly stud,” he muttered in L’liite.

Onyx jabbed Draeg with her elbow. “But Tulle,” she objected, “you haven’t said why the Heliconian Doctors failed to fix fertility.”

Tulle said, “They believed reproduction belonged to the Republic, state, not the individual.”

“To the shon,” corrected Pirin. “The shons are independent corporations. They purchase their gene pool from all the planets of the Fold.”

“And each shon, through its alumni, elects a Guardian of the Guard of Twelve. The shons are the Republic.”

That evening Blackbear got the kids home early enough to order a gourmet dinner and oversee a lesson from Hawktalon’s correspondence school. He bade Hawktalon to add up all the goats on each hillside before playing at the climate window again.

“Blackbear?” called Raincloud from the door. “You have to come out and see.”

Raincloud was resplendent in full Elysian regalia down to the sandals, with just enough of a train to require a pair of trainsweeps behind. The background color was bronze yellow, a comforting hue, bordered with butterfly wings of pale yellow with orange-ringed black spots like rows of coins.

“You had to see this outdoors,” she said, “before the trainsweeps insist on folding it up. Well? Do you like it?”

He found his voice. “It’s—it’s fantastic. They give you an extra couple of centuries?” he asked, estimating her train.

“The base length is two meters; anything less would look ridiculous. It’s a gift from Iras.”

Of course, a gift from the mate of the Sub-Subguardian, just as Tulle’s mate had sent the climate window for him. Blackbear shook his head, thinking, their debts were mounting.

“Don’t worry,” said Raincloud. “I told you, love, I’m working on that. Anyway, Iras said that at the Nucleus, robes and trains are de rigueur. She took me to The Golden Fritillary, where we got the stuff, then spent the afternoon helping orient the trainsweeps and teaching me how to walk so it doesn’t tangle.”

Blackbear smiled. “I’ll definitely redo your braids tonight. Perhaps I can pick up some of the pattern.”

“Thanks. The main thing is,” Raincloud explained, “now that I’m dressed ‘official,’ Iras promised that the Sub-Subguardian will see me tomorrow.”

Chapter 4

Despite her new Elysian train, Raincloud walked light on her feet, as if the Goddess held her up in Her dancing arms. A ridiculously confining garment for a goddess, she thought, but of course she would not deign to say so. She thought of Nightstorm, her eldest sister, who could wrestle a bear to the ground or pull children out of quake-collapsed buildings. Raincloud would face her own job with equal confidence.

At the entrance to the transit reticulum, three servos awaited her. Their build was the “floor lamp” type, their “lamp” heads bending forward now and then. News reporters again, she sighed.

“Are you the new Urulite translator?”

“Was the Valan freighter really a spy ship?”

“Is it true that Urulan now targets Elysian cities?”

Raincloud shook her head politely, as she had for the past two days. Iras had warned her that any word she spoke might be resynthesized by the less reputable networks. She adjusted her sleeve at the shoulder, glancing backward where her two trainsweeps neatly bundled up her train. These trainsweeps seemed content, not about to run off like the one that had followed her children. She kept expecting to see Hawktalon behind her, but of course the girl was on her way to Blackbear’s laboratory.

Her heart had skipped a beat to watch the family part from her, all three of them. It had been easier before, somehow, when it was just Hawktalon going off with Daddy to see his patients while Raincloud completed her exams. She half felt nauseous, as if a new one were just stirring in the womb. It was about time to start one, she thought, although she hated to give up nursing Sunflower. Her sister now had five children, by two husbands.

But here in Elysium, Raincloud’s education would bear fruit. In Founders City she had interpreted for Sharers—here, she would meet them on their own ocean. For years she had studied the Urulites—here she would translate their own broadcasts and, perhaps, help promote peace. Peace and freedom, the longings of her old teacher...

Rhun. That was his name, the escaped simian slave who had taught a handful of students at Founders University. Rhun had given her all he knew of Urulan, and more; he introduced her to the Sharer classics, too. He died young, as those of gorilla ancestry often did. Yet despite everything, even the horrors of his own past, Rhun had dreamed that someday Urulan would join the Free Fold.

Within the transit vesicle a nanoplastic seat arose, molding itself to meet Raincloud as she sat. The air inside breathed of floral perfumes, which Elysians wore liberally as if to attract the butterflies. Their trainsweeps emitted an occasional squeaking noise. Iras had told her this squeaking was just a byproduct of the circuitry. If so, it must be a common byproduct; the waiters, the windows, even the hall servo that took the trains at the door, could be heard squeaking softly if one listened. She imagined it was a language, “servo-squeak,” and idly tried to puzzle out its sense now and then.

“News, please,” she requested.

“Which network?”

“The Anaeaon.” Anaeaon offered the most reliable news.

A Valan jumpship freighter sprang up above the holostage, the one hit by Urulites enroute to L’li.

“The Imperator of Urulan has issued a statement...”

The Imperator’s face was never seen in public, but his voice crackled out from the holostage, presumably a broadcast recorded from Urulan. “Death to the Valan thieves and liars!” the voice exclaimed. “And let the Elysian money changers beware. We know all their plans to terraform our world and sell it off to the highest bidder...”

Terraform? How could Elysians terraform Urulan—an inhabited world? This was overblown rhetoric, even for the old Imperator. His threats would only further strain the Free Fold; some would even call for Urulan’s destruction. She shook her head. If only people everywhere would learn, as Clickers taught, to leave destruction to the Dark One. Humaneness was for humans.

But a war with Urulan might yet destroy the Fold. And if they ever attacked here... Elysian defenses were strong, but if one in a thousand missiles sneaked through, it would not take much to demolish its twelve cities, pearls floating upon the sea.

Raincloud considered this fact calmly, the same way she would wonder which of the Hills would next erupt to claim its blind sacrifice. Someday, Elysium and L’li and the others would have to look up from their petty squabblings over shared fold-points on the trade routes, and make peace with Urulan.

It was hard to imagine, though, what peace could be made with a nation that battered its own provinces to dust, and mated its own females to apes to produce slaves. A pity, for Urulan’s language and ballads were rich, and its landscape, never terraformed, bristled with fourteen-plated carnivores amid forests of giant ferns.

“Now,” spoke the sibilant voice-over, “a response from the Prime.”

The Prime Guardian, leader of the Guard of Twelve, appeared on the holostage. Across his talar he wore a golden sash, the sign of a Guardian. The sash seemed to glow, almost outshining his person.

“Elysium stands for peace,” the Prime declared, his voice filling the vesicle with an unusual resonance. “We will pursue peace with every inhabited world in the Fold, and beyond.” Raincloud’s Sub-Subguardian worked with the Prime; she wondered what that would be like.

“Raise seat level,” ordered an Elysian behind her, without the “please.” Servos counted for nothing. Raincloud, though, had been taught that courtesy to inferiors was a sign of goddesshood. She thought it best to maintain the habit, even though the only “inferiors” in Helicon were these machines. Elysians thought they made everyone equal, even man and goddess; but only their machines would call Raincloud “citizen,” instead of “foreigner.” A childlike people with their endless protocol and their meters of silken butterflies....

Not childlike, she corrected herself. Not at all, she thought again as the vesicle slowed to a halt, preparing to fuse with a longer vesicle that snaked along a deeper branch of the reticulum. As the two vesicles fused, her own seat became a platform which gently melted down into the lower floor, as the “snake” incorporated the smaller one.

“Elysian Fields Boulevard, next, Citizen,” reminded the voice.

“Yes, thanks.” Iras would meet her there, to take her to the Nucleus.

The vesicle fused to the reticular wall, and the walls melted through. Ahead and behind her, the trainsweeps squeaked softly and moved together, prepared to unfold the trains of their citizens. Raincloud stood, and she followed the Elysian before her as he entered the transit node, his train unfolding and stretching out behind him between the trainsweeps. She felt the tug at her shoulders as her own train did the same. The silken trains took some time to unwind and flow ahead, particularly as most of their wearers were engaged in lively conversation. Elysian transit, she thought, was made inefficient on purpose, to give the passengers ample time for gossip on their way, as if four days a week of visiting could never be enough.

The stark cream white light of the skyvault still disappointed her; if only they would bathe their mornings and evenings a proper red. The people, too, were of mostly white or amber complexion. A rich, dark-blooded planet—that was what Raincloud missed. But she brushed these thoughts aside with a faint condescension for these people who might live for years indoors without experiencing the natural product of her namesake.

There stood Iras Letheshon upon the gleaming white pavement, speaking to a hand-sized square box, a portable holostage, probably a call from a client. Iras had long ruddy curls and an upturned nose, the kind of face that would have made freckles outdoors. Her butterflies were cornflower blue, with rows of orange-ringed spots like coins. Her train extended back a good five meters, with two pairs of trainsweeps; a quincentenarian, at least.

“No, shonsib,” Iras was telling the hand-sized square box, “I assure you, it’s quite preposterous. Why, the Sharers won’t let us terraform even uninhabited planets, much less Urulan.” She raised a hand to wave at Raincloud. “My dear, you carried your train off like a native! Anyone would have thought you were raised in a shon.”

Inwardly Raincloud shuddered at the thought, but she smiled. “Thank you,” said Raincloud. “I hope that I now satisfy the dress code of the Nucleus.”

“To the letter. Just remember, don’t change pace too fast, lest your retinue can’t keep up and your train sag.”

Not that it would get dirty if it touched the street, Raincloud thought. Every bit of floor space was kept spotless by little sucking servos that scurried like rats from the gutters. There were no vehicles to spill oil, and certainly no farm animals to deposit dung. Only Elysians passed, with occasional pet birds or monkeys, heading up their trains like silk ribbons floating lengthwise down a river.

“Verid can’t wait to see you,” Iras assured her. “She has an urgent assignment.”

Urgent, indeed, she thought ironically. Iras and Verid were “mates”; the idea still intrigued her. Two men might be lovers, but how a goddess could expect worship from another goddess was hard to see. Raincloud herself thought of men as almost another species, exotic birds who carried hidden beauty in their plumage like peacocks. She adored watching men, especially demure, unworldly men, and wondering what secrets they might unfold. Nightstorm had teased her about taking a second husband, but that was not for her. Blackbear alone was worth more than two.

Iras’s holo box called again. A L’liite face appeared, requesting something about a loan. “I’m sorry,” said Iras, “I told you, that’s the best rate I can quote on a fifty-year term. I’ll be back in the office tomorrow....” She smiled apologetically at Raincloud. “I’m up to my neck closing the deal on a fleet of solar satellites the Valans will build for L’li.”

L’li’s population had swelled to an impoverished twenty billion since the Clickers left. The L’liites badly needed solar energy, microwaved down from the satellites; but how would they ever pay the bill, Raincloud wondered.

“The L’liites are stalling for concessions; I’ve run up huge fines for my Visiting Day. But the Valans will quietly compensate me. I love dealing with foreigners,” she added as if it were a compliment. Unusually ambitious for an Elysian, Iras took a creative attitude toward Visiting Days. A dangerous sport, in a community whose Right of Visiting replaced any notion of “right of privacy.”

“Is it true,” Raincloud asked, “that the Sharers won’t let you terraform?” On Bronze Sky, the Sharer delegates never let Raincloud forget that she inhabited a murdered planet, its ecosphere erased for the sake of human habitation. For two centuries since, Elysium had declined to finance another one. It surprised her to learn that the ocean-dwellers held such influence over interworld affairs.

“It’s true,” Iras admitted. “We can’t finance anything to do with terraforming, at least not directly. Indirectly... well, that’s not my department.” She shuddered. “It’s bad news to mess with Sharers. But really, don’t you think L’li will need a new world soon, to resettle their excess billions?”

The traffic of silk paused at an intersection, as a group of shon children passed, probably from a tour of the Nucleus. The word shon derived from a native Sharer word for “water cradle,” a bassinet which floated in a pool of water to generate a rocking motion whenever the baby stirred. The children of the Helishon wore brightly colored pantaloons that ballooned at the wrists and ankles, with shiny slippers that tapered to a point and curled back. Trainless until age twenty-one, they skipped and cartwheeled across the street, for all the world like a troupe of clowns. No wonder Elysians maintained that impish sense of humor in later life; whenever Raincloud turned unexpectedly, she could catch that look of “something’s up” in the corners of Iras’s eyes.

A man followed them, his train undulating across the street. His long, sandy hair flowed straight down his back; a sight enough to shock all of Tumbling Rock, to see so much manhood exposed.

“That’s the generen, who runs the shon,” Iras explained. “A generen acquires much influence, as the ‘parent’ of future voters.

Raincloud nodded. “Wasn’t Verid once a generen?”

“Yes she was,” said Iras, sounding pleased. “Generen of the Anaeashon, of course, in Anaeaon, three centuries ago. How I remember those days; hardly a night she spent without a call to one troubled child or another! Many of our leading logens were once her shonlings.”

The way cleared. Ahead lay the sphere of the Nucleus, immersed entirely within a spherical “moat” of transit fluid. Its surface was pockmarked with vesicles pinching inward or outward to cross the moat.

The trainsweeps gathered up their trains again, as Raincloud and Iras prepared to enter a vesicle. As the vesicle enclosed its passengers, a servo built like a sea star frisked Raincloud, its eight whiplike arms passing lightly over her body.

“Sorry,” Iras apologized, “don’t mind the octopods. You’ll get security clearance soon.”

The interior of the Nucleus was given to marble facings and imposing velvet drapes. Most people wore their trains inside, although the trainsweeps had to keep them half-folded-up, making their wearers look more ridiculous than ever. Following Iras’s lead, she kept hers on until they reached the suite of the Sub-Subguardian.

With relief she at last unhitched her train and passed it to the servo arms at the reception desk. The office suite was paneled in walnut, quietly elegant. A man walked out as they entered, a striking figure in red black-striped butterflies. “Good morning, Lem,” said Iras, who of course could not introduce him. The man was well muscled and carried himself with the tautness of a rei-gi assistant. Raincloud stared at him frankly, thinking, had he been a goddess, she might have invited him to spar sometime.

Lem nodded to Iras. “Tell her my mate will call soon.”

“Please be seated,” the room told Raincloud. “The Legate of Imperial Urulan is running overtime.”

An Urulite legation—here? Urulan had no official embassy anywhere in the Free Fold. Raincloud glanced sideways at Iras.

“For ‘cultural affairs’” Iras whispered. “A small operation, it covers espionage, I think.”

Raincloud nodded thoughtfully. Still, what business would this legate have here? The thought of the lost Valan ship chilled her. Never mind, she told herself: Walk in the shadow of the Dark One.

A thicket of reporter servos stood in the corner, their lamp heads bending forward now and then. A half an hour passed with only the reporters bobbing patiently by the door, a real door with solid walnut panels and grooved trim. A good job of carpentry, Raincloud observed admiringly. This Sub-Subguardian had some taste.

At last Verid’s door opened, a real wooden door, on its hinges. Out strode the Legate of Urulan, a bearded man in his forties. His shoulders were broad and thick, like those of her old Urulite teacher, the result of growing up in a stronger field of gravity. Barely taller than the Elysians, his heavy frame might have weighed twice as much; his shape gave him the look of an outsized dwarf. A tunic of fine chain mail over garments of deep blue silk covered his broad torso, and at his elbows and knees were jointed rings of silver. At his waist, from the right, hung his ceremonial sword; from the left, what appeared to be a particle blaster, although it must have been disarmed to be permitted anywhere near Helicon, let alone the interior of the Nucleus.

Her memory quickened at the sight of him. To be sure, his blue eyes and aquiline nose had little in common with Rhun’s dark complexion and simian brow. And yet, his build and his gesture were the very image of her Urulite-born professor. She felt as if she had known the man a long time.

The servos immediately bent their body-necks forward at the Urulite, blurting questions in Elysian and in Urulite. He faced them squarely but ignored their questions. “The fate of a Valan spy ship deliberately entering the space of Imperial Urulan is no concern of yours. Should the immortal Elysians choose to meddle in Imperial affairs, let them beware. We’ll find out just how immortal they are.”

With this threat, the man took a sharp turn. Raincloud and Iras had risen respectfully, but the Urulite, distracted by the reporters, nearly walked into Raincloud on his way out. The man caught sight of her, and Raincloud automatically lifted her right arm to clasp his left shoulder, as she would have greeted her teacher. Her palm felt the cool mesh of metal beneath. “May the sun rise behind you,” she spoke quickly in Urulite.

He clasped her shoulder so hard it startled her. “The sun rise for you! Can it be, a civilized soul in this barbaric land?”

Iras intervened. “Your Excellency, this is Raincloud Windclan, our new translator. And... Lord Zheron... Imperial Legate for Cultural Affairs.” Iras faltered, her face pale with shock at the breach of protocol.

Raincloud told Zheron, “I have studied the classics of your people, especially the ballad of Azhragh and Mirhiah.”

Zheron laughed heartily. “Imagine, the ballad of Azhragh! Lord Raincloud, you must dine with us at the legation. You will hear from me soon.” With that he departed at last, the reporter servos trailing behind.

She blinked with surprise, then turned to reassure Iras. These Elysians were so sensitive.

“Are you all right?” asked Iras in a hushed tone.

“Yes, of course. I only...” She paused. Framed by the walnut doorway, she saw the Sub-Subguardian Verid Anaeashon.

Verid was bowing to the reporter servos as they left, an unusual courtesy. Slight of stature, even for an Elysian, Verid had rounded shoulders and coarse black hair. Her eyebrows were thick and expressive. They lifted ever so slightly, now, as Verid turned to Iras.

Iras sighed with relief. “It is my duty to present Raincloud Windclan, who meets our highest standards.”

“Thank you, dear. Sorry we ran late.” Verid smiled affectionately at Iras, then bowed to Raincloud. Her thick eyebrows rose as she added, “This citizen meets our very highest standard.”

“Thank you, Sub-Subguardian,” Raincloud said, her face warm from the unexpected praise.

Her composure recovered, Iras laughed. “You must call her ‘The Owl,’” she mischievously told Raincloud. “We all do.”

“Enough!” exclaimed Verid with a wave of the hand. “Back to your visiting. Don’t make too many loans today, or the logens will get after you.”

Iras bowed and departed, the coin-spotted butterflies flashing down her back.

Verid’s shoulders shook heavily with silent laughter. Then she beckoned Raincloud to enter the conference room. Her figure did indeed resemble an owl; the thought was distracting.

“I hope I said nothing amiss?” Raincloud asked, as the door closed automatically behind them.

“It’s not what you said,” Verid explained. “You put your hand on the man, in public—a stranger whose mate you’d never even met. Even our closest friends would never touch in public.”

“Of course.” Elysians never so much as shook hands; they bowed, and left just enough room. It seemed a way of keeping space in this rather claustrophobic city.

“But Urulites expect physical contact,” Verid added, “among men of the ruling class. Obviously you know that. It’s one reason they distrust us. Never mind young Zheron’s threats,” Verid added, a remark which reminded Raincloud that despite his mature appearance, Verid might be ten times his age. “His statement was for the press. What is significant is what he left out. He did not call the Elysians treacherous slaves of the Valan barbarians. He did not accuse us of scheming to terraform Urulan. He did not even denounce me for summoning him for this insulting conference. Most important,” Verid added, her eyebrows rising, “he did not deny that the incident of the Valan freighter represented a serious error of judgment on the part of the Imperial Command.” Verid nodded to a chair.

Raincloud sat on the chair, which was made of polished wood with legs curved back elegantly. From above dangled the usual servo arms, discreetly overhead. Verid sat across from her and leaned forward, flexing her knuckles. “I am honored, indeed,” Verid said, her eyebrows arching to her hairline, “to host ‘a goddess from the Hills of the Dark One.’” The last was spoken with just the right accents and clicks.

Raincloud was pleased, though caught off guard. Verid herself clearly knew a language or two. She lifted her chin and risked a return. “It’s an equal honor to meet one known as a ‘rising star.’”

At that Verid’s shoulders shook again, and she laughed loudly, the sort of laugh that probably carried outside the room. “One of my shonsibs must have told you that.” Verid flicked her wrist to a servo arm which slithered down carrying two glasses. “Yours is plain spring water,” she assured Raincloud, not identifying the contents of her own. “Now then. Why would a ‘goddess’ leave the Hills to learn languages spoken on worlds many light-years away?”

This question felt patronizing. “Light-years mean little, within the Fold.”

“Of course. How did you learn Urulite ways? Have you lived there?”

“Oh, no.” Urulan had been closed to foreigners for several generations. “But Professor Rhun was a native.”

“So I understand.”

“He was a pedagogue in a noble household. He escaped on a stolen ship,” she explained, answering the obvious question. “He traveled twenty years at lightspeed, then backtracked for two years because he’d overshot, subsisting all the while on recycled greens. As a ‘pioneer,’ he was lucky to land a post at Founders University. I was doubly lucky to have him,” she added, although it had been hard at first to accept correction from a man. She added, with some hesitation, “He was a ‘sim.’”

Sims were descended from gorilla-human hybrids, a slave population bred on Urulan. But in succeeding generations, most progeny were sired by human masters, as the “human” look fetched a better price on the market. Today many sim descendants were barely distinguishable from purebred humans; but on Urulan, they remained slaves.

Verid nodded. “Regardless, he taught you well. Now before we discuss your assignment, please bear in mind that nothing of what passes between us must go beyond you—not even to your mate. If I hear otherwise, your value to us will be lessened substantially.”

“I am accustomed to confidential work.”

“Yes, with the Sharers—what a contrast, by Helix! You do avoid reporters, that’s good. But do you realize that secrecy will be a greater challenge here?”

Verid knew about the reporters. Raincloud’s scalp prickled. “Do all the walls have ears?”

“Not in my office.” Verid grinned, tapping the wood paneling with her knuckles. “One needs a special permit for sonic isolation, to get around the constitutional Right of Visitation. We’ll arrange it for you, once your clearance goes through.”

So this “Right of Visitation” was also a “right of eavesdropping.”

“You know why you’re here,” Verid told her. “You’re one of a handful of Urulan experts in the Free Fold. We have reams of intelligence to decipher. For years, we’ve just passed it on to Valedon—but can we trust them?” She paused reflectively. “Valan intelligence assures us the Urulites have about six thousand interstellar missiles, give or take a thousand. But how do they arrive at that guess? Not a clue. How good is their estimate? Could it be off by a factor of ten?” Verid leaned forward. “Even more to the point—where did those missiles come from? A Valan House, perhaps?”

Raincloud swallowed. “How did Urulan pay for them, I’d like to know.”

“Another good question. Urulan is virtually bankrupt, but it has massive mineral resources.” Verid spread her hand on the desk. A page of light appeared beneath her fingers, several characters blinking red. Raincloud recalled a similar servo table at the apartment, in a side room. The apartment contained a number of unfamiliar objects whose purpose remained a mystery to the Windclans. “I have released a file to your account; it will open to your hand only, and will disappear when observers approach. These are signals intercepted from the Imperial Command. See what you make of them.”

Raincloud nodded.

Verid paused, stroking her chin between her thumb and forefinger. “As for our friend Zheron... if he follows up, I would accept the invitation.”

So that little “meeting” with the legate had been more than coincidence. Her pulse raced. “Just what have you in mind?”

“It wasn’t in your job description,” Verid admitted. “But the opportunity is ripe. The Imperator is dying, we know that. There’s a chance for change; and Lord Zheron is one who wants change. We need to help him find the way.”

“I’ll have to think about this.”

“We’ll double your pay.”

“It’s not that,” said Raincloud sharply. “I must think of my ‘family.’” She used the Clicker word.

Verid nodded. “Of course. You’ve got your own little shon. Raincloud, in all seriousness you are safe in Helicon—safer than anywhere else in the Fold. You know how we Elysians feel about personal safety.”

“I’ve noticed.” They got foreigners to do their dirty work.

Verid leaned forward. “One last question. You have observed us Elysians, rather intently, I would guess. Tell me what you think. Where lies our greatest danger?”

Raincloud drew a breath and thought quickly. The seconds ticked by. “The Urulite missiles threaten us,” she began. “Yet the real danger lies here, in Elysium. Elysians are—” She felt like saying, “overgrown children.” “Elysium is one great protective shon. Your people, with all their civility, cannot understand the mind of a people that can sell and trade human flesh...”

But Verid leaned back, her face politely blank. Clearly Raincloud had disappointed her this time. “‘The monster swallower swallows itself,’” Verid quoted from The Web, a text Raincloud knew well. “You are right, though, that the danger lies here.”

Chapter 5

Blackbear caught Raincloud around the shoulders and kissed her, as he helped her undo the rest of her train.

“Doggie?” inquired Sunflower hopefully, eyeing her pair of trainsweeps which stayed outside. “Doggie for Sunflo’?”

“No doggie.” Raincloud swept the child up into her arms, his face already clouding over for a downpour of tears.

“How was it?” asked Blackbear. “Did you see the Sub-Subguardian at last?”

“How was it, Mother?” echoed Hawktalon, swinging Fruitbat by her cloth wing.

Raincloud winced as Sunflower let out a wail. “I met the Sub-Subguardian, and a legate of Urulan, too.”

“An Urulite?” Blackbear stared in amazement. “An Urulite—here?”

“I just ran into him by accident—”

Hawktalon asked, “What’s a ‘legate,’ Mum?”

“You weren’t supposed to meet any live Urulites,” said Blackbear.

“Well, there’s a small ‘cultural legation.’ Verid wants me to deal with them.”

He gripped her arm. “Valedon is practically at war with Urulan; another attack on the trade route is all it will take—”

“I said, what’s a ‘legate’?” Hawktalon insisted.

“A ‘legate’ is somebody who represents a foreign government,” Raincloud explained. “The Imperator of Urulan can’t be everywhere at once, dear.”

“Why not?”

Blackbear turned and went to the kitchen to order hot cereal for Sunflower, still angry. Raincloud followed him. “Before I forget,” she said, “you have to call on Verid sometime, and I have to call on your lab director. It’s the proper custom.”

“I’ll give her a proper piece of my mind when I see her,” Blackbear grumbled. “When do we manage all this visiting, anyway?”

“Our Visiting Days start tomorrow.”

“Oh, Goddess; I forgot. How does that work? Can’t we get exempted?”

Raincloud paused. “Let me see...”

“Excuse me, Citizens,” came the voice of the house. Sunflower dropped his spoon and looked around, eyes wide. “May I offer assistance?”

“Yes, thanks,” said Raincloud. “How does ‘visiting’ work?”

“The Elysian Constitution guarantees everyone the right to visit and check up on everyone else. For every three days on the job, the law requires four ‘Visiting Days’ to entertain your fellow citizens.”

“But we’re not citizens,” objected Blackbear.

“As foreigners,” the house continued, “you may apply for an extra workday based on ‘religious grounds.’ You must sign a statement to the effect that your deity expects unending earthly toil of mortal beings, and that working less than half the week would cause decline in your mental health and well-being.”

Sunflower was squirming, and Blackbear felt his diaper. “Diaper, please,” he called. A clean cotton diaper appeared in the magic kitchen window. Blackbear muttered, “I might as well use the time to potty-train Sunflower. What’s your opinion?”

Raincloud shrugged. “It says a lot about what they think of us mortals. Our Goddess worship is just a mental handicap; it’s covered by the same department that regulates servo guides for the blind and visual aids for the deaf.”

“I’ve yet to see a blind Elysian.”

“It’s a small department.”

Their request would not be cleared for another week, so Blackbear resigned himself to a Visiting Day. He told the house to set his Visiting Hours from two to five. This information would be available instantly throughout the city, although he could not imagine who would care to “check up” on him.

The next morning, reckoning by the Bronze Skyan calendar, was the Day of the Snake, a feast day celebrated each year in the Caldera Hills. The day commemorated the mythic entrance of good into the world, in the form of a monstrous Snake sent forth by the Dark Goddess. When the Snake returned to Her, its goodness spent, She recaptured it between her middle arms and devoured it alive. The Day’s lesson was a warning to meet the world’s evil with good, from the center of one’s being, and face the consequences whole.

Hawktalon decorated the figure of the Goddess with “snakes” cut from spirals of colored paper, as well as two embroidered heirlooms from Raincloud’s mother and grandmother. “When are we going to get a real live snake, like Cousin Wolf Eyes?” Hawktalon pestered her mother.

“Cousin Wolf Eyes’s mother is a High Priestess,” Raincloud reminded her. “She has to tend the Great Snake year round. If you grow up to be a High Priestess, you can have a snake.”

After rei-gi exercise, Raincloud was eager to start on her translations. She had located a “terminal” at home, an unfamiliar table-shaped object whose function she now recognized. The terminal accessed a vast neural network that permeated the cellular city.

“Come on, Daddy,” begged Hawktalon, “let’s try something hard for a change. Why don’t you ever swing the stave at me, like you do at Mother?”

“Go, Daddy.” Sunflower bounced happily on the mat. “Go upside down.”

“Damn you,” shouted Raincloud from the next room, her voice stuttering with sharp clicks. “May an earthquake swallow your regulations!”

Blackbear winced. “Please; Sunflower will hear.”

Raincloud came to the sitting room, perspiring with anger. “That Goddess-cursed tabletop told me it’s not my work day, and it won’t release my files. Not even the one Verid gave me.”

“Well, it is a Visiting Day,” Blackbear said, though he resented it too.

“But this is my home.”

It occurred to him, no wonder Draeg chose to live outside Helicon in a silkhouse on a Sharer raft, even during swallower season. “Well, for now, let’s just remember—‘On Valedon, do as the Valans do.’”

Her lip curled. “If this were Valedon, we’d be working day and night. Who d’you think manufactures all those servos? Do you see any three-day factories around here? How do they pay for everything—banking and tourism,” she muttered. “Nobody’s got an honest job.”

“We do,” said Hawktalon. “Come on, Mother. Come swing a stave at me.” She raised her shoulders and pulled in her stomach expectantly.

“Sorry.” Raincloud looked up as if an idea had occurred to her. “I’m going to see Iras.” She went to put on her talar and train.

Hawktalon had to spend the afternoon at her correspondence school lessons in reading, programming, and the geography of Bronze Sky. Blackbear was just reading Sunflower one last book before nap, and planning in his head a long letter to write to his parents, when the house announced a visitor.

Both children immediately rushed out to see who it was. Blackbear checked his watch; it was just past two.

At the door stood Alin. He wore a different train, a scene of saffron meadows rimmed by mountains, but the same dried-leaf butterflies lined the border, virtually invisible against the background. With him stood Draeg, a lambskin jacket covering the L’liite student’s scant costume.

“Hullo, Blackbear,” said Draeg, thumping him on the shoulder. “Where’s that little fighter of yours today?”

“I say.” Alin glanced beside the door, with a bemused expression. “Did the citizen never come and pick up her mate’s trainsweep?”

The runaway trainsweep was back again, just outside the door. It certainly looked like the same one, though it had not been there the night before.

“Doggie!” Sunflower tiptoed out the door, his arms flapping up and down, then he threw himself upon the beetlelike servo. Hawktalon followed, jumping with glee, her beaded braids whipping about her face. “She’s back, Daddy; look, she came back!”

The two visitors collapsed with laughter. “I told you so,” Alin reminded Draeg. “You didn’t believe me, did you, that the servo tailed him across the City? You owe me ten credits.”

“The owner—she did come and take it back,” Blackbear said lamely.

“What touching loyalty!” exclaimed Draeg.

“It even remembered your address,” said Alin. “Tell its owner I’d like to look into its network.”

Whatever could be wrong with that trainsweep, Blackbear wondered. He hoped its owner would not be angry at him this time. He summoned his social graces as best he could. “Won’t you come inside? It is my highest duty to serve you.”

Alin exclaimed with delight to see the climate window in action, set for a view of grassy hills that came close to the feel of Bronze Sky; clouds obscured the actual blue sky of the planet it came from. “Let’s see the volcanoes,” he insisted. “I ordered them special.”

The volcanoes appeared, first a quiet, gently sloping one whose lava crept downward at a trickle, cooling to smooth fields of black, then an explosive one that delighted the children. As the floor rumbled beneath their feet, Alin said, “I hear your shonling is quite a fighter. And yourself, as well.”

Blackbear frowned. “Fighting is for females,” he said, although he knew the Elysian “female” did not do justice to the Clicker “goddess.”

Alin laughed. “We’ve heard all about your shonling! But Draeg assures me you’re just as good.”

“Only defense.”

“Don’t be modest. Would you accept a challenge? I’ll cover the medic.”

Astonished, Blackbear stared down at the small, compact Elysian in his immaculate robe of dried-leaf butterflies.

“Alin’s good,” Draeg assured him. “Look here, Alin, you and I’ll spar a bit, so he sees what we do.”

“But—but there’s really not enough room,” Blackbear objected.

“Oh, we’ll manage,” said Alin. “Go ahead, switch off the holostage; I’ll cover the charge.”

“It is off,” Blackbear muttered absently. In the meantime, the two visitors set out giving orders to the house. The walls expanded back and extra mats slid out. A medical hovercraft settled expectantly at the door. A set of loose-fitting trousers appeared for Alin out of the kitchen window; it seemed that any sort of organic material could be “cooked up” there.

The visitors stripped to the waist and practiced their strikes. Alin leaped in the air and thrust-kicked twice before he thudded down, then he and Draeg faced each other. They attacked in a style involving vicious blows with the feet and hands. Their power-packed thrusts left their own balance painfully vulnerable; Blackbear wondered that they could not see that.

Suddenly he recalled with a pang his brothers and cousins in the Hills; what good times they used to have. With them, it was fun, less formidable than training with his own goddess. Despite his misgivings, he kicked off his shoes and swung his arms to limber up. Inwardly he called on the Dark One, for himself and his opponent’s safety.

Draeg took him on first. After a feint or two, the L’liite slashed down at Blackbear’s shoulder with the side of his right hand. Blackbear stepped back to his left, his left arm parrying Draeg’s right. He deflected Draeg’s arm just enough to guide it downward into his own right hand. Continuing to circle backward, he caught Draeg’s arm in his right hand, then his left, letting Draeg hurtle forward by his own momentum. With a twist he brought the man down to the mat, thudding safely on his side.

“Delightful!” Alin clapped, adding to Draeg, “He barely lifted a hand, did he; and there you went, this way and that.” The move did look like that, “Tree Sways in the Wind.”

“All right, Citizen,” Draeg muttered, breathless. “You try him, then.”

“You’re sure you can take anything?” Alin asked.

Blackbear shrugged self-consciously. “We’ll see.”

To his surprise, Alin repeated the same move as Draeg. But Blackbear knew better than to meet it the same way. This time, he slid his right leg forward and under, like a partner joining the dance. His right arm swept upward to deflect the blow; then he caught Alin’s arm and swung him around sideways, “Round the Mountain,” to land on his chest. He pinned Alin’s arm at the shoulder and wrist, leaving his body immobilized.

At this sight, Draeg laughed so hard that tears came to his eyes. “I never thought I’d see an Elysian flat!”

Blackbear frowned at this disrespect to a fallen opponent. But Alin picked himself up with good humor. “It is said, we live to amuse our friends. I think, L’liite, it’s your turn again.”

So he met their attacks, from one side to the next, each time catching the thrust at just the right time to deflect it. The fourth time Alin was too quick for him; Blackbear slipped and fell onto his knee, twisting it. Pain shot through his leg, and he thought with a sinking feeling, it must be sprained. Raincloud would be furious.

A servo scooted out from the hovercraft. Blackbear’s heart pounded, and he resisted the impulse to pull away as the machine extended its tendrils over his leg, barely touching here and there. But the pain eased up steadily; he could just about walk on it again. Rubbing his ankle, Blackbear thought, those medic servos must know how to treat foreign “defectives” after all.

“Well done.” Alin’s forehead was bright with sweat. “I’d heard of rei-gi but I had never seen it done by a master.”

Just then Raincloud returned, unhitching her Elysian train at the door. “By the Goddess, what’s going on?” she exclaimed in Click-click. “Those children are out with the trainsweep again—and you...” She looked him over.

“Oh we’re just, uh, ‘visiting,’” Blackbear assured her, flexing his leg.

“Do you fight, too?” Alin asked her politely. “Do give us a try. Your mate has already gotten the better of us.”

“Excuse me.” Raincloud would consider it beneath her to spar with men other than her consort. Also, she seemed to have much on her mind; her visit to Iras must have brought some result.

“Don’t worry,” Alin assured her. “We’ll take it easy for you.”

Blackbear caught his breath at the unintended insult. Raincloud turned slowly toward them, her face wooden. “A moment, please.” She disappeared in back, then returned in her wide-bottomed trousers with a sack of beans on her back, slung low like a seated child. “You both come at once.”

“Not I,” exclaimed Draeg with a L’liite phrase. “Two men against a female—I wouldn’t be caught dead.”

“Come,” she ordered.

“I’ll join Alin,” offered Blackbear, knowing that despite her retort, Raincloud would be pleased to show off her skill.

The two men attacked her from either side. With a swing of each arm, she sent both assailants to pound the mat. As they dusted themselves off, Alin’s astonishment was plain to see.

Raincloud turned to Draeg. “You, there,” she commanded. “You pin my arms from behind, and let them try again.”

Too amazed to object, Draeg complied. When Raincloud’s arms were firmly pinned, Alin and Blackbear rushed her again, harder than before. In a blur of arms and legs, the three men went sprawling.

As Blackbear got up and dusted himself off, Raincloud turned to Alin. “I trust you are not hurt, Citizen?” she said sweetly.

“Not at all, Guardian.”

Raincloud dumped the sack of beans, none of which were spilled. The medic servos set about attending their inevitable bruises.

Blackbear felt immense pride for Raincloud, and a feeling of warmth for the men. “You see,” he told Alin, “now we are called ‘brothers of the mat,’ since we’ve been thrown by the same ‘goddess.’”

“Is that right?” Alin laughed. “Tulle will love it! Thanks so much; you’ve both entertained us immensely.”

Ignoring him, Raincloud turned to Blackbear. “Iras gave me one of her accounts today. Today’s a work day for her, so the account will open, and I can transfer my documents to work on—”

At the front of the sitting room, a shimmering form of a man appeared in the column of the holostage. The man wore Urulite chain mail. He began to speak in Urulite, which Blackbear recognized but did not comprehend.

Alin’s mouth fell open. “The holostage; wasn’t it turned off?”

“Of course it was. Wasn’t it, house?”

“The receiver was off,” said the house, “by default, as you instructed. The transmitter remained on; to turn it off by default would soon exceed your budget.”

“Then we’ve... been transmitting...” Alin caught his face in his hands and seemed about to faint.

“Great Helix,” Draeg exclaimed, “we’ve been entertaining the whole damned city all the while! Cheer up, Alin old man,” he said, attempting to pat him on the back. But Alin pulled back stiffly, retreating to the corner.

“If I have failed to serve you in any way,” the house added, “please report my defect to...”

Meanwhile, Raincloud had recognized the Imperial Legate, Lord Zheron. Her face froze at the sight of him, here in her own sitting room; but it was only an image, after all. She took a deep breath and stepped forward.

“Lord Raincloud,” Zheron was saying in Urulite, “that was the best display of manhood I’ve seen of any barbarian on this planet. I command the honor of your company at our legation, on the third of this month. You will dine well, and enjoy the height of our cultural entertainment.”

“I am honored,” Raincloud replied, trying to think quickly, aware of Blackbear and the others watching dumfounded. Verid had told her to accept; but she had not agreed to do so. “I must... consult my Deity, as to my plans.” Urulites were notoriously superstitious.

“Your Deity can hardly refuse,” said Zheron. “I challenge you to fight to the death.”

At her side Blackbear and Alin looked on, uncomprehending. Raincloud tried to keep her eyes on Zheron without blinking. For Urulites, a duel was the customary prelude to a feast, to work up an appetite. A fight “to the death” was just a ceremonial figure of speech; or was it? Let Verid find some other foreigner for her schemes.

But no goddess backed down from a challenge. Not on the Day of the Snake.

A thought occurred to her. “Is Lord Zheron aware that Lord Raincloud is... a female?” No Urulite in his right mind would fight a woman.

Zheron laughed. “Anyone can see you’re no female.”

A vicious warlord this was, the kind her gentle professor had to escape. And yet, his language reminded her hauntingly of Rhun. Urulites were people, too, and all those Rhun left behind to suffer. What would Rhun have thought if she let this chance go?

“I accept.”

As the Urulite’s image flickered out, Alin was shaking his head, much chagrined. “Blackbear, I thought I explained about the holostage, the first night you came in.”

“I’m sorry,” said Blackbear. “But we’ve never turned the transmitter on.”

“You never turned it off. The transmitter is on all the time; you have to pay to turn it off. It’s because of the Right of Visitation. There’s an added fine for turning it off on your Visiting Day, but I told you I’d pay it.”

“You mean anyone could have peeked into our living room these past three days?”

Draeg shook his head, trying unsuccessfully to keep a straight face. “Alin—you’ll never live this down.”

Alin gave him a rueful look. “Sparring ‘in public’—you’re right, I’ll never live this down.” Nevertheless, he recovered his smile. To Raincloud he said, “I see the Owl has put you to work.”

“Quite,” said Raincloud. A good thing none of them knew Urulite, she thought.

“We’d best be going, Draeg,” Alin concluded. “Thanks again.” He bowed, and Draeg departed with him. The medical hovercraft, too, took off from the window ledge. Outside, the children called after it in delight.

“Raincloud,” Blackbear asked apprehensively, “what was that all about anyway?”

“Lord Zheron, the cultural legate,” Raincloud explained. “Inviting me to a duel.”

“To what?”

“A formality,” she explained. “In the old days, before the Imperium, each warlord had his own little fief atop a needle rock—you know the bizarre terrain on that world. The only way two lords could meet was to duel to the death. Nowadays they’re more civil.”

“Goddess! You sent him packing, of course.”

“Nonsense,” said Raincloud irritably. “I accepted.”

“But they’ll fight with weapons—to hurt each other, or worse. The Goddess forbids any such thing! Raincloud, how could you?”

“You know I’d never disobey the Dark One.”

Swallowing his anger, Blackbear turned and went outside to check on the children. Still playing with the trainsweep, they were leading it up and down the street and imitating the little squeaks it made as it altered direction.

Raincloud followed him. “Trust me,” she said soothingly. “I’ll be careful.” From behind him, she massaged his shoulders. His anger subsided, but he still could not bring himself to speak. If only they were home, with the clan, he thought; the Clanmother would have forbidden any such thing.

After supper, the blond Papilishon returned for her trainsweep. “We’re so sorry,” she insisted. “After switch-off, it should have lost all memory; we had it retrained completely. But this morning, it ran off again, right in the middle of a busy thoroughfare. It’s unaccountable; we’ll have to ship it back to Valedon, although I doubt they’ll find the defect, as this sort never shows up on inspection. I’ve ordered a new one anyway. But please, let me settle for your inconvenience. A hundred credits to your account? Make that two hundred.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t possibly...” Blackbear reddened with embarrassment. “Inconvenience” was rarely worth money in the Hills.

“Please, I insist. Your inconvenience is worth far more.”

“Well—” He watched the children huddling over the trainsweep. They looked solemn; they would not give it up without a struggle, this time. “You might just leave us the trainsweep,” he offered half-seriously.

Her eyes widened. “Really?” She looked at him with considerable relief. “You’ll see, it works perfectly, aside from its imprinting. Well, I can’t thank you enough. Do let us show you the town, some time.”

“Hooray! Hawktalon leaped in the air and did a flying somersault. “Come on inside, Doggie; we’ll get you supper.”

He had forgotten, the servo would add to their electric bill, just like the two from Raincloud’s new train.

Raincloud proved unhappy about taking on another electric consumer, even more so about his refusal of two hundred credits.

“But the children,” Blackbear insisted. “It’s their one great toy here.”

Her eyes narrowed as she watched the trainsweep, which Sunflower now rode upon, maneuvering about the broadened sparring room. “Maybe there’s a ‘sport’ in its network. Funny things happen in servo networks; they’re never trainable to perfection. This might be of interest to someone. I’ll ask Iras.”

That evening Raincloud worked late at her translations. When at last she came to bed, she lay staring pensively at the soft yellow light from the mock window across the room. Blackbear stroked her braids and looked past her.

“You’re still angry.”

“Yes,” he said, but he put his arm around her.

Raincloud sighed. “Verid says Urulan needs a chance to start talking peace.”

“A duel to the death is hardly the way to start.”

“It may be easier for them to talk to me, a foreigner, than to talk with Elysians. Both sides risk less.”

“And what do you risk?”

Raincloud paused. “I don’t know.”

“There you are. Why not stick to your broadcast translations, what you were hired for. By the looks of it, there’s more than enough to keep you busy.”

“It’s all the same, though, all blather about missiles and terraforming. What else would you expect them to broadcast? It’s obvious I wasn’t hired for that.”

“This Sub-Subguardian could have told you up front, before we came.”

“Would we have come?”

“We can still go home.”

“Yes, you could go home—and give up ‘immortality,’ just like that.” Her voice sounded tired, and her eyelids fluttered.

“Of course, I don’t mean that,” he said. “Now that we’re here, we’ll manage. But it’s all so... strange.” He thought of the walls expanding at a command, the doors oozing open, and the holostage on for three days. He shivered down to his toes.

“I miss Tumbling Rock,” Raincloud admitted quietly. “But we came here for good reasons. We can’t just quit.”

Blackbear saw before him his sisters and brothers, and Raincloud’s sisters and brothers, and all of their children, children, children.... A hot teardrop rolled out of one eye and fell to the pillow. Then Raincloud’s face loomed over his, kissing away the tears. He pulled her close at the waist, ready to give her the utmost pleasure. That at least brought home closer.

Chapter 6

Blackbear awoke with a start. The dream had come again, the one in which he struggled desperately against the rising floodwaters with Sunflower in his arms. The muddy waves were relentless, tugging at the child like bestial claws. The end of the dream was always the same—the child wrenched out of his arms, floating down into the white-frothed current, just as his youngest brother had done years before; the Dark One claiming her blind sacrifice. And then he awoke.

Across the room, the “window” cast a pallid light, nothing like the ruddy glow of Bronze Sky morning. Raincloud lay asleep, still, her spiral of braids turned toward him. From the kitchen came shuffling noises; the children had risen early.

He dressed quickly and went to the kitchen. Hawktalon looked up from her bowl of ice cream, which she evidently had ordered for herself and her brother. Blackbear had tried to convince the house to ignore Hawktalon’s orders, so far without success. Its program recognized the children as adult occupants, equivalent to their parents. This would have to be fixed somehow; it was on Blackbear’s list for the day.

“Daddy,” asked Hawktalon, “did that Urulite really challenge Mother to the death?”

Blackbear frowned. “Where did you hear that?”

“The reporters outside.”

The night before, they had ordered the house to wall off the holostage by extruding shafts of nanoplast from the ceiling, a less costly alternative to turning it off. Yet even this barrier did not discourage all intruders. Exasperated, he went to the door.

Outside stood three reporters, bending their lamp heads from their tubelike bodies. “We seek the Bronze Skyan translator, Citizen Raincloud Windclan.”

“We’re busy, please.”

“What is the Urulite’s interest here? Is there any connection to the destruction of the Valan freighter?”

“No comment,” he said firmly. “House, please close the door immediately.”

“Yes, Citizen.” As the frame dissolved and the walls oozed together, the house added, “Your fine for closing the door on reporters will be twenty credits for a first offense.”

Raincloud came into the sitting room to make a call at the holostage. Blackbear returned to the kitchen, where he faced his daughter with her half-eaten bowl of ice cream. “Listen, Hawk: no more ice cream, do you hear? The next ice cream I see, we’ll send you to the shon.”

Hawktalon felt her stomach. “I’m sick of ice cream, anyway. What’s the shon like, Daddy?”

Taken aback, he said, “Never mind. Go do your exercise.” Then he hauled the old potty seat out of the bathroom. Uncomfortable memories of Hawktalon’s training days returned. He hoped the second child would respond better.

“Okay, Sunny,” Blackbear began. “Time to be a big boy and sit on the potty.”

“No.” Sunflower was busy spilling soap powder on the floor, to watch the scrubber-servos scurry out from the wall and lap it up. This was hardly a promising start.

“Get up, Sunflower!” ordered Hawktalon. “Pull your pants down, and sit on that potty!”

Sunflower looked up, much impressed by this unexpected attention from his older sibling. He tip-toed over and sat on the potty.

“You should offer him a lemon drop,” added Hawktalon. “He’ll do anything for a lemon drop.”

Blackbear looked at her. “Where are you getting lemon drops?” But he already knew the answer. That house would have to get fixed.

Raincloud came back. “Good news. I reached Iras about our runaway trainsweep. She made us an appointment with a Valan specialist to investigate its network. An interesting ‘sport’ might be worth some credits.”

“Good thinking!” said Blackbear. As Raincloud’s arm slipped around his waist, he kissed her, glowing with thoughts of the night before. Then at last he sat down to eat his own much-delayed breakfast. Yet hardly had he ordered his fried eggs when a muffled voice called from the sitting room. “Blackbear? Are you there?”

It was Tulle’s voice, from the walled-off holostage. Embarrassed, Blackbear jumped up and ordered the wall to melt back.

Tulle was at home in her garden with her capuchin nibbling something from her hand. Behind her strolled a couple of three-legged grazing animals which he could not make out. “The lab group is having a party today at the swallowtail pavilion,” she told him. “We’d love for you to come.”

Another “social” lab meeting, marginally in accordance with the visitation rule. “Sure, I’ll come,” said Blackbear, anxious to get started on his project. “While you’re on, would you happen to know how one tells the house about children? It lets them get away with anything.”

“Hm. An interesting problem.” Tulle returned the capuchin to her shoulder, where it stroked her blond hair. “You might try defining them as pets...” Seeing his look, she hurriedly added, “Never mind; the house must have a program for shonlings.”

While Raincloud went out to make her visits, Blackbear got the children dressed and out into the transit reticulum. “Doggie,” of course, had to come along, too; in fact, Sunflower insisted in riding on top of her. Once when the child slid off, the trainsweep let out a burst of squeaking which alerted Blackbear to turn and see. He regarded the machine with new interest. Perhaps after all this Doggie was not a bad addition to the family. He endured the furtive stares of passing Elysians, who of course would not speak to him, not knowing his mate. Only a trade servo approached him to inquire, was he a traveling sideshow, and would he perform at the next garden?

When they arrived at the swallowtail garden, Blackbear left the children outside with Doggie, warning Hawktalon not to stray from the window where he could see. Entering the pavilion, he sat at one end of the moon-shaped table, between Onyx and Draeg.

“The machine’s working,” crowed Onyx, cheerfully snapping her fingerwebs. Her grandmother had been a Sharer, the aquatic race of women with webbed hands and feet. “We can get right back inside the embryo and feel the blood pumping through its ventricle.”

Blackbear blinked at this. “Feel the blood pumping?”

“You fixed it,” Draeg told Onyx. “The Valans will buy you out from us one day, and we’ll be lost.”

Pirin and Lorl sat across from each other, with Tulle at the opposite end of the mooncurve. The little black-hooded capuchin delicately explored the floor at her feet.

“So Blackbear, which project do you think you’ll take?” Tulle asked. “You could look for mutations in untreated embryos that confer partial longevity; like Draeg’s heartless mutant, a fertile embryo whose heart and vascular system don’t age.”

“But the rest of the body still fails,” Draeg admitted. “You take one step at a time. It’s like undoing all the work of the Heliconian Doctors.”

“With modern technology,” Tulle pointed out. “The alternative is to start with a longevity-treated embryo and look for mutations that partially correct fertility.”

Onyx said, “This mutant has multiple problems with fertility. The primordial germ cells mostly fail to migrate to the genital ridges. The few that make it degenerate during meiosis. The gonads develop, but no fertile eggs or sperm are ever made.”

“Exactly,” said Tulle. “But you’ve found some extremely interesting egg mutants.”

To make egg cells, the primordial germ cells have to undertake a tortuous journey within the embryo, migrating from the yolk sac, through the gut layers, into the germinal layers, to settle at last in the genital region. There, female germ cells develop into ovaries and undergo the first division of meiosis. Meiotic division halves the chromosome number, so that once the future egg and sperm unite, the offspring regains the double chromosome count, one copy of every chromosome from each parent.

“I’ve found several mutations in the simulator that enable the germ cells to migrate properly,” Onyx told him. “The cells make normal pseudopods to help them creep through the gut to the genital region, where they actually start to form ovaries before disintegrating. I’m convinced that this one gene I’ve found will correct egg production.”

“Which gene is that?”

“It’s called Eyeless, because it was first identified in a mutant embryo which failed to develop eyes. My mutants, at a different part of the gene sequence, avoid that problem. But, like Draeg’s Heartless gene, Eyeless regulates other things too—including the migration of germ cells.”

“I see,” said Blackbear. “Do your Eyeless mutations help male germ cells develop, too?” The early part of germ cell migration is identical between the sexes.

“Unfortunately not, at least in the simulations I’ve checked so far,” Onyx said. “In a male Eyeless mutant, the germ cells end up at the pre-ovarian region, while infertile testicles develop separately. But we’re working on it.”

Onyx went on to explain the molecular structure of the Eyeless gene and its protein product. Blackbear tried to follow as best he could, because the Eyeless gene looked like a good project for him. Then Tulle asked Pirin to report on his new simbrid clone, an embryo which made mutant proteins that improved longevity. Blackbear stole a look outside at the children. Sunflower was riding the trainsweep, while Hawktalon had taken out her rattleback stone and was spinning it upon the spotless surface of the street, watching it slow down until it “magically” reversed direction. Beyond them, in the street, the Elysians passed majestically to and fro, their colorful trains gliding behind them.

As Pirin began to get into the details of his simbrid clone, Tulle stopped him a moment. “Questions, anyone?” She looked along the arc of the table, her gaze resting at last on Blackbear.

Onyx whispered, “Go on, ask something. That’s how you learn.”

Blackbear felt the blood pounding in his ears. He knew she was right, but he dreaded sounding ignorant. “I’m sure this is obvious, but—just what is a simbrid?” The literature he read had been frustratingly vague on the pedigree of this important embryo culture line.

Pirin turned to him politely. “The simbrid, or simian hybrid clone, was derived from a blend of primate species. Its development closely resembles the human embryo, but we only maintain it in vitro. It’s a good model system to test predictions for human development.”

“I see.”

Draeg spoke up. “Tell him which primate species.”

“Homo gorilla, Homo paniscus, and Homo sapiens.”

Gorilla, chimpanzee, and human. Once considered distant cousins, the three apes now shared a common genus. “But—” Blackbear found his voice. “But that’s rather like the Urulite sims, isn’t it?”

Draeg grinned from ear to ear, but the Elysian students were shocked. “It is nothing of the sort,” Pirin coldly replied. “I told you, these embryos are terminated in vitro, generally before the fourth month. No civilized people would maintain such monstrosities to term.”

“Of course not,” Tulle interposed. “But Blackbear’s comparison is reasonable.”

Draeg nodded. “That hearing we held on the simbrid question was a bad scene. I thought those logens would eat us alive.”

Onyx said, “It wasn’t all that bad. They let us go ahead with the simbrids, didn’t they? A good thing Alin helped us out.”

“Pirin,” Tulle asked, “what would you suppose is the mechanism by which this protein affects longevity...”

The discussion lost him again. Gorilla hybrid embryos in a test tube—he wondered what Raincloud would think of this. The thought made him sick, himself. But then, all medical research needed subjects; how else was it to be done?

Suddenly Draeg’s mouth opened, and he nudged Blackbear to look out the window. Blackbear turned, half rising in his seat, thinking the children were in trouble. But the two of them were still playing in the street, taking turns riding the trainsweep.

“There,” pointed Draeg. “The man in white.”

A white train, about three meters in length, made its way slowly down the street toward Science Park. The man at its head wore a white talar without decoration, or none that could be discerned from this distance. The stark figure conversed with two younger Elysians at either side, about the age of Pirin or Lorl, who led shorter trains with typical butterfly trimming. The contrast was striking, especially to Blackbear, for whom white was the color of death, of stillborn babies and bleached bones and the frozen caps of the tallest Hills.

Around the table, voices hushed. “It’s him,” Onyx whispered.

“Who is he?” Blackbear asked.

“Kal Anaeashon,” said Onyx. “He’s a logen. A rather dangerous one.”

“The arrogant bastard,” said Draeg in L’liite. “What’s he doing here, around Science Park?”

Curious, Blackbear looked out again upon the figure in deathly white. “Who are the younger ones with him?”

“Students,” Onyx explained, “who may become logens some day. Both he and Alin studied with Verid, you know, centuries back.”

“His students call him Killer,” said Draeg.

“He teaches lies,” added Pirin. “Lies about The Web. And he has flouted our highest law.”

Taken aback, Blackbear thought, Draeg and Pirin actually agreed about this. “Is he a criminal, then?” he asked, warily eyeing the stranger now.

“Elysium has no crime,” Pirin assured him. “Only... moral iniquities.”

Tulle did not notice, now deep in technical discussion with Lorl.

“He took a servo for a ‘mate.’” Onyx giggled. “Kal’s first mate died young, in an accident out on the ocean, and he never quite got over it. So he took a servo as a ‘mate,’ to embarrass people who sent their mates to call on him—he’d send the servo in return! It was ever such a scandal,” she said, slipping her Valan beads between her fingerwebs.

Draeg added, “He’s a damned hypnotist with words. If he told the Guard of Twelve to shut down the entire research establishment, they’d do it—and he just might, one day. Hey—he’s not stopping here?”

Tulle looked up at last. Her mouth opened, as if she just remembered something. “We’ve run overtime, into my home visiting hour. I had an appointment just now, with that logen, remember?”

Onyx gripped the table. “You’ve got an appointment? With Kal Anaeashon?”

The eyes of Pirin and Lorl widened with consternation.

“Well, I could hardly refuse, could I?”

Completely baffled, Blackbear turned to Draeg. “What does he want with us? And how did he find us here?”

“Everyone knows where everyone is—it’s all on the network. That’s why I live out on a raft, with the Sharers. Come see my place, will you?”

“Thanks, Draeg. But now—”

Tulle interrupted, “Remember, you all, this is just visiting.”

“Drinks, metalman!” called Draeg loudly to the nearest servo. “Another round of drinks for a lively party. All we need is the Killer to see us at work instead of play.”

Blackbear winced, thinking, the “network” would hear that, too. He would never get used to this place. His head felt dizzy, and he wished he had never left Bronze Sky.

The man in white appeared, walking slowly toward their table. Kal Anaeashon was shorter than average, even for an Elysian, although the stark whiteness made him seem taller. His only adornment was a single dried leaf pinned at his shoulder, presumably in reference to the leaf-imitating anaean butterfly. His hair was gray, the first gray hair Blackbear had yet seen here, but his face was as youthful as that of any Elysian.

As Tulle rose, Kal bowed very slightly. “Sorry to interrupt your pleasure.”

Draeg said loudly, “It’s a great time we’re having. Won’t you have a drink?”

“Hush,” whispered Onyx hoarsely. “That’s an insult; you’ve never even met his mate.”

“His servo, you mean,” said Draeg.

Tulle told the logen, “Please join us. We’re celebrating our latest progress on the simbrid clone.”

“I won’t trouble you long.” Kal’s voice was low and deceptively reassuring. “You know what concerns me, Tulle.”

“I’ve held any number of public hearings,” she said. “On the simbrids, the human trials, and so forth.”

“Your hearings were excellent. No one doubts your command of medical research, nor your concern for individual life. But now your work threatens more. Your work has broader consequences which, so far, you refuse to address.”

“Excuse me,” Tulle replied coldly.

Kal stood, barely moving. The others were silent, and at nearby tables the butterfly-decorated customers turned their heads, hoping to overhear.

“If ageless Elysians could bear their own children,” Kal spoke in the same quiet voice, “what would become of us as a people?”

“Who can say?”

“You have not addressed this issue in any hearing.”

“Politics is not my concern. As Alin says, a logen can make politics out of anything.”

“Think again,” said Kal. “It is said, ‘Compassion anywhere breeds caring everywhere.’”

At this quote, probably from The Web, both Pirin and Lorl rose from their seats, their faces wooden. Without speaking, they left the table.

Tulle replied, “The citizens select Guardians to decide such matters. The Guard of Twelve funds my entire project.”

“Do all the Guard’s actions pass the test of wisdom?”

Tulle shifted back a step. “I think we can save further talk for the logathlon. We wouldn’t want to waste our best lines, would we?”

Kal bowed again. “As you wish. At the fourteenth hour, the first of the month?”

“Yes. Yes, of course, Citizen.”

The logen departed. Suddenly, everyone was talking at once. The capuchin nestled protectively in Tulle’s arms. Onyx was at her side, whispering soothingly.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Tulle muttered. “But they can’t play politics with my work.”

Tulle believed that the Heliconian Doctors had kept Elysians infertile on purpose, so that reproduction belonged to the state. But why?

Draeg shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe how many hearings we’ve held, on one thing or another. Now they want to pin the death of civilization on us!”

Blackbear asked, “What exactly is a logathlon?”

“A logathlon is a kind of moral trial in public,” explained Onyx. “You saw one on the news, the other day. In the old days, any citizen could call one, but today you have to be a registered logen.”

“It’s more like a duel,” said Draeg. “A duel of words.” He laughed and wrestled Blackbear’s arm. “Tulle may be in worse trouble than Raincloud, you know.”

Chapter 7

Tulle’s solution to Blackbear’s problem with the house was to register their residence as a foreign shon. The house now recognized Hawktalon and Sunflower as shonlings, with limited rights of access to its services.

Hawktalon was furious. “I want my ice cream, and my volcanoes! What is there to do around here, anyhow? Where are all my friends to spar with? I’m going to stow away on a Fold ship and go home.”

Raincloud eyed Blackbear doubtfully. “This is no place for a young goddess. We can do the schooling, and the exercises, but what then? No responsibilities. At home, she had the goats to milk every day.”

“We’ll soon get back to my lab,” Blackbear assured her. “She’ll help me with my experiments.”

“... the plague of flies has now spread throughout Papilion, though not yet to other cities,” came a news voice from the holostage. “They carry no disease, but they discourage the tourist trade. The flies’ origin remains a mystery, but authorities are inquiring at local Sharer rafts. And now, the scandal all Helicon’s talking about. One of our foremost logens was caught fighting in public...”

Blackbear recalled Alin’s incident. “Scandal is nothing compared to what you’ll get from those Urulites.”

Raincloud sighed, tired of hearing about it. “You tell Verid yourself when you visit her.”

“I have to come up with an appropriate gift, first,” he reminded her, recalling the train and trainsweeps from Iras.

“Yes—and I’ll need something for Tulle, too...” More expenses. The hour chimed from the holostage, eighteen already.

“I won’t eat dinner,” Hawktalon warned. “Not without my ice cream.”

His watch was five minutes fast again—why? He must have missed something in the local time correction.

“Dear,” said Raincloud, “we’d better review our finances, don’t you think? Even once our extra workday gets approved, we still won’t break even.”

Blackbear agreed glumly. “It’s hard to see how any foreigner could, with all those extra utilities, and the taxes. At this rate, we’ll have to ask the clan for a loan.”

Raincloud made a nasty face at that.

“Well, what do you suggest? With the children, I’ve been asked more than once to perform in a circus.”

Raincloud snapped her fingers. “There’s the trainsweep, remember. That quirk in her network, with unexpected properties, just might earn us something.”

They took the trainsweep in, along with the children, of course. The servo firm, a branch of a Valan house of manufacture, was situated in a grand sweep of a building even more impressive than Science Park. The specialist turned out to be a tall Valan goddess with ropes of amethysts across her chest and a light pen behind her ear. “You can think of me as the servo-doctor,” she told them with a laugh, rubbing her hands. “Come along, dear, let’s hook you up to the scanner.”

For some reason Doggie was reluctant to comply. She wiggled her front legs and her stalked visual sensors, then retreated to the opposite end of the room.

“Fascinating,” muttered the specialist. “Learned aversive behavior... to retraining, perhaps?”

“It’s all right,” Hawktalon told the trainsweep, caressing its nanoplastic carapace. One side had bright green marks where Sunflower had tried out his crayons. “We’re right here, me and Sunflower. We won’t let anyone hurt you.”

“You won’t try to ‘retrain’ it?” Blackbear asked, anxious not to alter the children’s pet.

“Of course not. Just take a look, that’s all.” The specialist hooked up some leads to the connector port at the rear of the trainsweep. Then Hawktalon led the little servo through her various tricks, including letting the girl on for a ride and emitting squeaks when she fell off.

The burst of “servo-squeak,” as Raincloud called it, greatly excited the specialist. “This phenomenon we call ‘sonic byproduct,’” she said. “Sonic byproduct consists of sonic and ultrasonic vibrations emitted spontaneously by servos. Its occurrence was unforeseen by the network trainers. One theory holds that sonic byproduct is a form of communication which evolved independently among servos.”

“Really,” said Raincloud. “A servo language.”

“Of course, Mother,” said Hawktalon. “Doggie talks to us all the time.”

The specialist smiled indulgently. “The research has proved inconclusive. The House of Chrysolite won’t support it; any hint of unreliability in their trained products might embarrass them.”

Raincloud asked, “What’s the difference between training and programming?”

“Programming means telling the hardware exactly what to do. Training means ‘teaching’ a neural network with built-in uncertainties to go about a partly defined task. It’s like training a dog: You can predict the result in general terms, but not in detail.”

Blackbear smiled. “Like training a shonling.” He thought ruefully of Sunflower, who by now had learned pretty well what his dad expected in the potty, but it was so much more fun to “spill it” on the floor and watch the floor-servos scuttle out to clean it up.

Hawktalon enthusiastically ticked off Doggie’s qualities. “She’s got intelligence, and feelings, and even—curiosity.”

“What’s that?”

Hawktalon took out the rattleback toy from her overalls. The rattleback was a wooden oblong with an obliquely rounded turning surface. She spun it swiftly on the floor; the object turned and wobbled.

The trainsweep immediately crossed the room, coming right up until her front end arrived just at the wobbling object. The object slowed, then suddenly reversed and turned round the other way several times before it came to a stop, the “rattleback” effect. All the while, Doggie trained her visual sensors on the object as if fascinated.

The specialist’s eyes widened with astonishment, but this time she said nothing. “Curiosity,” Blackbear guessed, was another unintended “byproduct” of neural network training. Nodding slowly, the specialist took the light pen from behind her ear and made some kind of note on her electronic sketchpad.

Raincloud cleared her throat. “How much is it worth?”

“Well, for the servo—”

“No, no!” shouted Hawktalon. “You can’t give Doggie away, you promised.”

“We’ll scan the network, that’s just as good,” said the specialist. “A thousand credits for the scan.”

Blackbear smiled. That would at least get them ahead a month.

At the Fertility Lab, Blackbear tackled the problem of the Eyeless gene. He would test a variety of mutant alleles—DNA sequences of Eyeless that differed slightly—for their predicted effect in the embryo simulator. First he had to learn to manage the delicate instrument, with Onyx’s patient tutoring.

The elephantine embryo loomed before him above the holostage, its triangular head folded over with two round bulging eyes. “This is the first month, a critical stage for Eyeless,” Onyx explained. “As you can see, the eyes are normal with this allele.”

She stepped onto the holostage. The “skin” of the embryonic form puckered as her arms entered, and she stepped inside. Her hand rested lightly beneath the pulsating bulge of the heart tube, which had yet to develop separate chambers. She reached up into the head between the eyeballs, cupping them in her hands. “You can see the lens and cornea tissues are shaping up. Come on in,” she urged.

Strangely reluctant, Blackbear stepped inside. He had to remind himself it was only a model, not the actual sacred act of creation. The outer embryonic “tissues” surrounded him with a weird fog of light. But the surface of the heart tube actually pressed back against his hand.

He felt nauseous. “How does that happen?” he exclaimed.

“The program is set to ‘feel’ the heart and eyes,” Onyx said. “You can set it plenty of other ways; to ‘feel’ the brain and spinal column, for instance, and penetrate all the rest. Whatever you want. I test a dozen standard settings for each allele.”

Tentatively his hand caressed the vessels of the shuddering heart, its rapid pulse never slacking.

“Now this will be hard on your stomach,” Onyx warned. “We’re going to expand...”

As Onyx spoke orders to the servo, the embryo expanded around them. The heart ballooned and dropped out of sight, while the two eyes grew to the size of basketballs within the gigantic head cavity. It was all Blackbear could do to keep steady on his feet.

Now the tail end of the embryo was expanded around them, curving into a transparent scallop. Tubes of various tissues filled this region, the developing gut and kidney tissues. Onyx pointed to the posterior tip of the hindgut, just under the “tail,” where a spattering of red dots stood out. “Those are the primordial germ cells. The future eggs and sperm. They’ve migrated as far as the hindgut. Now watch as they develop.” She spoke a word to the simulator.

The tubes of light undulated and expanded, as the model tissues “grew,” the gut and early kidney tubules differentiating. Meanwhile, the red-coded germ cells crept gradually up through the embryo, dividing and increasing in number as they moved. At last they reached the ridge-shaped tissue of the early gonads, where the cells settled and concentrated in two splotches of red.

“They’ll just reach the preovarian part of the gonad,” Onyx said, “where they’ll develop fine until meiosis. Anyway, I guess you’ve had enough for your first time.” What an epic voyage for those tiny cells, and barely one in a million would ever germinate to become a human being.

Onyx spoke to the simulator, and its glowing apparition dissolved. “Let me show you our tissue culture facility.”

The predictions of the egg development program had to be tested in tissue culture for biochemical side effects before it was worth trying gene replacement in the simbrid embryo. So, any allele whose simulation showed promise for egg development would be built into actual genes within cultured germ cells. The cultures grew in clear vessels that looked like plastic, but in fact were “intelligent” nanoplast. Each vessel oozed open at the touch of a light pen, then closed, self-sterilizing.

For a week Blackbear immersed himself in his project. His home terminal accessed an immense range of literature on embryonic engineering. The kitchen window obligingly printed out bound volumes of text, much to the delight of Raincloud, who began to request all the Clicker classics. Blackbear wrote his brother Quail about his progress, and how their children would be born immortal some day.

His own children soon adjusted to the lab routine. While Sunflower occupied himself with his animal dolls or molded a chunk of nanoplast with a light pen, Hawktalon helped her father by setting up culture vessels. When Visiting Day returned, they were happy to go out and tour the butterfly parks.

Raincloud discussed her Urulite texts with Verid. “Your translations are first-rate,” Verid told her, sitting forward in her walnut chair, alert as a perched owl. “Zheron wants to establish an informal channel between us and his master, the Imperator. Your visit will do much to enhance his confidence in us.”

Raincloud was skeptical. “A ‘duel to the death’ hardly suggests peaceful intent.”

Verid laughed heavily. “Surely you know better. We must respect cultural differences.”

Raincloud hesitated. “You have to draw a line somewhere.”

“Urulan has far to go, to meet our standards. We can expect a first step, not a great leap forward.”

“I know all about Urulite standards,” Raincloud said frankly. “You did say you’ll double my pay?”

“Of course, hazard pay. Not that you’re in any real danger.”

“Then why are no Elysians willing to play?”

Verid nodded. “You’re right, we need to train Elysian staff. That’s why Lem Inashon will accompany you to the Urulite Legation.”

Lem Inashon was Verid’s junior associate, the well-muscled fellow she had run into briefly with Iras. Lem’s mate soon met Raincloud for lunch at a garden of heliconians.

The flocks of fluttering blue wings were enough to daunt the most jaded eye. Inside the pavilion, a pair of Valan jugglers tossed balls of flame. Two things Elysium never seemed to lack were amusements and money.

“You know,” said Lem’s mate over tea and flower cakes, “Lem can give you a really good time, if you like.”

“Well, thank you,” Raincloud replied, somewhat puzzled.

“I mean, a real good time. Lem took quite a shine to you,” the Elysian explained. “He likes a well-built figure. He’s very potent, and experienced; he can satisfy foreign women.”

As her meaning sank in, Raincloud’s jaw fell. She hardly knew what to say. “But—but he’s your own mate,” she sputtered at last.

“Of course, dear. That’s why I recommend him with confidence. He arranges the same for me; we both have sophisticated taste.”

The idea of a goddess offering her own consort for service was repulsive beyond words. How could Raincloud possibly work with this man now?

“Don’t worry, dear; I can see you’re not interested. Lem himself won’t say a word; he’ll be quite correct, I assure you.”

“Uh, thanks,” Raincloud muttered. Cultural difference, she thought wryly.

Perhaps she had better find out more about Elysian manners. Iras might give her some pointers. She and Iras had quickly become friends. They understood each other perfectly on matters of finance and outsmarting bureaucracy. On one coincident Visiting Day, they spent an afternoon at the circus, a haunt Iras favored because the servo manager was lenient about overlooking her bank calls.

The acrobats in the ring had just completed a quadruple somersault in midair when Iras returned to her seat from the nearest holostage. “The deal’s done,” she said breathlessly as the sound of clapping died. “I can’t tell you the terms, but the L’liites plan to build a hydroelectric dam across the River of Babies.” The River of Babies was so-called because impoverished L’liites dumped their unwanted babies in the river, in the traditional belief that their suffering would earn them reincarnation into families of wealth. “The Valans will build the dam, actually. A kilometer in height, it will store enough to irrigate an entire continent.”

Raincloud herself would never seek a loan outside her clan, much less offworld, for several trillion credits. “That’s a major asset for you,” she said at last.

“My biggest since taking the L’liite division. So how’s your little shon? You seem thoughtful, today.”

Intermission was called. Raincloud got up and stretched. “I’m working on ‘cultural differences.’”

Iras nodded. “I’ll bet. Elysians do have certain stereotyped beliefs about foreigners. For instance, they assume that all foreigners are willing to risk life and limb as acrobats,” she said, nodding to the ring below, where the performers were rearranging the set for the next act. “Virtually all circus performers are foreign of course; what respectable Elysian would cavort like that in public? Of course, the reverse inference does not logically follow, but there you are.”

“So that’s why Verid expects me to risk life and limb with Lord Zheron.”

“Now, now, let’s not be touchy,” Iras said.

“Another thing—how do I make it clear that I’m uninterested in being shown ‘a good time’?”

Iras laughed as if Raincloud had made an exceptionally witty remark. “You can’t blame them for trying. Everyone knows foreign heterosexual females are, shall we say, sex-starved? Their men slow down with age, don’t they?”

“But why would Elysian females introduce me to their mates?”

“Marriage Elysian style works different ways. For some, it’s just a partnership of convenience; others keep a lover for a century or more. Verid and I met out of the shon, and we’re still lovebirds. But forever—who can say?”

Raincloud was shaking her head. “Where’s their honor,” she clicked softly to herself. Elysians had no notion of “male honor” in her terms. To think of Lem with his youthful body, ready to serve her pleasure just like that; and now she had to work with him daily. What an assault on her virtue.

Her eyes narrowed at Iras. “Quality is better than quantity. Besides, where I come from the women increase in desire as they age. Perhaps in ageless Elysium the men are starved.”

Iras shrugged. “If your virtue ever needs relief, you might try the delights of reality simulation in the Palace of Rest. Some prefer it to the real thing.”

What to wear for the Urulite visit was a puzzle. Chainmail was out of the question. She settled on her native rei-gi outfit, freshly pressed so the trousers swung out like bells, with her butterfly train for outdoors. An unlikely combination, but the best she could manage. Whatever she wore, she still felt undressed without Hawktalon or Sunflower on her back. Instead, only Lem Inashon, her admirer in scarlet, accompanied her. Fortunately his behavior was strictly correct. He had done his homework on Urulan, and he was trained in Alin’s style of fighting. Still, Raincloud would have felt better with Hawktalon; she was well acquainted with the girl’s ability to defend herself.

The Urulite legation was an unmarked facade on a small street in the diplomatic quarter—one of the few sections of Helicon immune to the Visitation Rules. No electronic scandals would arise here.

As she and Lem arrived, a doorway pinched open as usual, revealing a man who wore chain mail with leggings of brilliant geometric designs. He escorted them up a long hall lined with cultural artifacts, mostly painted screens depicting traditional Urulite processions, battles, and mythic stories, such as how the sun-god Azhragh carved the world out of the sky-goddess Mirhiah and sowed it with people-seeds. The seedlings grew up and got the bright idea of cutting off their stems with their swords to liberate themselves from the soil.

She came to a large hall with a central area ringed by a black circle. Around the circle were several men with the thick-limbed build of her old teacher, all wearing swords. They sat in imposing wooden chairs with legs carved into animal heads with knobbed horns and ringlike mouths full of teeth—the famous fourteen-legged “caterpillars” that prowled the uninhabitable valleys between the needle rocks of Urulan. The men stopped talking as soon as she entered.

Raincloud felt her heart pounding. She reminded herself, they were only men after all, grown men without even children on their backs. Where were their sisters to look after them? There was something pathetic about men who had to hide their own goddesses, then go to such lengths to protect themselves.

The sound of a drum reverberated in the hall. One man rose to greet her, clapping his hand on her shoulder as Zheron had done. “Lord Zheron bids you welcome in the name of the Imperium. I am Lord Dhesra, weapons master. For your choice, we have knives, swords, spears, or staves. Apologies, on this barbaric world no lasers or particle disintegrators are available.”

What a pity—she could have used, say, a guided missile. “A stave, please,” she said, since she had to pick something.

Dhesra turned expectantly to Lem.

“No, Lord,” said Raincloud quickly. “I represent us both, today; it was agreed.” No point in risking two casualties where one would do.

Dhesra nodded to Zheron, who rose and entered the ring. “This is the ring of death,” Dhesra added, pointing to the black circle. The first person to touch outside was “dead”.... Rhun’s face arose in her mind, recounting the custom in his gently ironic tone. The “ring of death”—in the old days, a moat full of armor-plated caterpillars would have lain outside.

Lem gave her a sharp look, but Raincloud nodded back; all was well, so far. She accepted the stave from one of Zheron’s men. Then she stepped into the circle.

Zheron stood opposite and faced her squarely. Holding his stave in his left arm, he saluted her with his right arm to the shoulder, and she did likewise. Then they separated.

Raincloud held her stave horizontal at first, trying to gauge its weight. It was heavier than the sparring poles she was used to. Her rei-gi training made her highly conscious of vulnerability as an attacker.

Zheron spread his feet and crouched with the stave held between his two hands. He made a few tentative moves, like a rei-gi assistant, none serious yet, though she shifted her weight just in case. He stepped sideways, then again, causing her to circle as well. His aim, she realized, was to steer her gradually back to the ring.

Raincloud thrust her stave handle directly at his chest, a move any beginner might parry, but at least it would get things started. Zheron deflected the blow with the side of his stave, and a couple of the onlookers laughed. Seeming to sense her reluctance, Zheron attacked with a broadside swipe. Raincloud ducked underneath and slipped sideways. He was too far off for her to do much; she would have to close in, somehow.

Another blow she parried with the side of her stave. The force of it jarred her hands, and she felt herself being pushed backward. The heavy pole was a nuisance, she thought. Would it be too dishonorable to drop it?

Now, though, she was back dangerously close to the ring. Zheron struck again; and this time, as her stave caught the blow, it flew out of her hands. It clattered to the floor, the end of the handle falling well across the dark line of the ring. That was it; the ring was crossed, she was finished.

Yet in the same instant, she saw out of the corner of her right eye that her opponent had not relaxed his stance. The onlookers were shouting, but the match was not done. The fallen stave, once released from her body, did not “count.”

Zheron lunged forward, his stave horizontal, aimed at her chest. As his left leg stepped forward, Raincloud advanced with her left, turning slightly to her right. His stave slid harmlessly across the front of her shirt.

With her left hand Raincloud caught hold of the stave between his two hands. In the next instant, she deflected the thrust upward above his left shoulder; little force was needed, as Zheron’s own momentum flung him headlong. Meanwhile, her right leg stepped backward and drew her torso around, cementing her own position.

With a deep bow, Raincloud brought the stave down, including the man who still wielded it. Zheron fell to the floor and tumbled sideways, tearing the stave from her grasp.

The onlookers shouted and cheered. Zheron had kept hold of his stave, a feat she admired, but its tip had fallen across the line. Raincloud had won.

Breathing heavily, Raincloud watched him snap back to his feet. Nothing looked so appealing as a man who just lost a hard fight. Her first thought was to help tend his bruises, an offer a rei-gi assistant would have appreciated, but she thought better of it.

Zheron stood tall, admitting no injury; no servo medics were in evidence. “Lord Raincloud honors our household,” he announced. More quietly he added, “Next time request, ‘Spirit only.’ Then we’ll have a better show.”

Raincloud smiled to herself, and made a mental note of it.

“Not bad,” observed Lem. “I’d like to learn your style.”

She said nothing, rather doubting her clan would approve teaching rei-gi to a such a man.

The Urulite warriors were rising from their seats and coming forward. Introductions followed, with much clasping of the shoulders. Musicians appeared with flutes and metal drums, playing traditional tunes in an eerie eight-tone scale. The company soon progressed to the dining hall. Raincloud went along, her arms shaking now that the tension was gone. Now she could wonder, at last: What were they really up to?

The dining hall had an oval ceiling hung with heavy crystal chandeliers. The long table upon the dais was set with porcelain and silver of a quality that her brothers would have loved to see. Beyond the table, richly colored silk curtains hung to the floor. From between their folds Raincloud caught a glimpse of a face mask on a pole, customarily carried by every Urulite female. It fascinated her, despite her revulsion, to see the things Rhun had told her come to life.

She was led to her seat across from Zheron. An Urulite man poured wine; there was not a mechanical servo to be seen.

Raincloud wondered to what extent the rejection of servos reflected custom, or relative cost. She refused the wine for herself.

“A vow to your Deity?” Zheron asked.

“Yes, indeed,” she said.

At this admission, Zheron, too, turned back his wine and requested water for both. This unexpected token of respect impressed Raincloud.

“So,” Zheron asked, “what brings a warrior like you to this world of soft cushions?”

Raincloud was not a warrior. “I come in peace,” she said.

“Peace, peace; what peace? Where is peace? Death and abomination fill the skies. Your Elysian hosts live in a ball of crystal.”

With his last remark, she was tempted to agree. But the Free Fold had made genuine progress, for its members. In any case, it would not do to dishonor her employer. “Our hosts treat us with great courtesy,” she insisted.

Zheron’s eyebrows knitted, and he exclaimed, “Courtesy is what these people lack. How dare they interfere with our Imperial affairs.” He referred to Verid’s summons following the destruction of the L’liite freighter.

The first course was brought, a plate of unidentified meats arranged upon grape leaves. The waiter had thick fingers with stubby thumbs. He was probably a sim—and therefore a slave.

Raincloud swallowed doubtfully before she tasted the dish. To his last retort, she told Zheron, “The Elysians see things differently. ‘Compassion anywhere breeds caring everywhere.’”

Zheron waved a hand as if brushing away an insect. “Compassion is for females. How can you deal with women who won’t even put up an honest fight to the death? Elysians cling to life for centuries. They live in eternal shame.”

“Why are you here?” Raincloud asked suddenly. “What’s here for you, Lord Zheron?”

He did not answer right off, but drew back as if to protect his thoughts. “Elysium is small,” he offered, “the smallest of the Fold’s worlds.” She realized, he meant population. “Elysians know little of us; they are the last people likely to gain advantage. If we start here, we have little to lose. If they betray us, a mere squadron could eliminate them.”

Her scalp prickled as she realized his meaning. She repressed the impulse to call him a bully, not a warrior. “Just what do you wish to ‘start’?”

Zheron shrugged. “Connection. Alliance. Mutual interest.”

Wealth, trade, and capital investment. The fruits of peace, however shameful. After all, Elysium had the greatest excess capital of any world in the Fold.

The other guests were getting livelier as the dinner advanced, not surprising given the size and frequent refilling of their wine glasses. Their jokes and tales grew more outlandish, and more pointed. Invariably the villain of each tale was shown up to be no better than a female.

“You smile,” Zheron observed, watching her keenly. “You disbelieve me?”

“No, of course not, Lord Zheron,” she quickly replied.

“You think we lack the stomach for it.”

“That is inconceivable,” she added politely.

“Well, some of us do lack the stomach for it, by Azhragh,” he volunteered abruptly. “Isn’t that so, Dhesra?”

Dhesra, at his right, nodded vigorously. “Those advisors and sycophants who fawn at the foot of the Azure Throne. They ought to be castrated.”

Unsure what to make of this, Raincloud tucked the comment away in her mind for Verid.

Zheron leaned forward. “I think you barbarians lack the stomach for it.”

Startled, Raincloud knew he meant to provoke her. Facing him sternly, she said, “I do not understand you correctly.” Surely, she thought with exasperation, she would not have to fight again?

He leaned back, chuckling to himself. “Of course I meant not you, Raincloud. I meant your Elysians.”

She considered this. “You might give them a try.”

“You will come, then? You will make a pilgrimage to the Azure Throne?”

Her lips parted without sound, and she shared a startled glance with Lem. Could Zheron really mean a delegation from Helicon to Imperial Urulan? A world which no foreigner had entered officially in the past two centuries?

“Such a... decision shall not be made lightly,” Raincloud replied at last, trying not to stumble over the words.

“Of course not. The Azure Throne must never be approached lightly.”

As Raincloud left the dining hall, Lord Zheron was in a jovial mood, that of a man at the end of a good feast. Raincloud had the dizzying sense that she was caught up in a chain of events beyond her control. Perhaps the Urulites wanted her for the same reason they chose Elysium—she was someone they could relinquish at small cost if things went wrong.

But for her it was not so simple. If either world thought it could use her lightly, it was mistaken. Let Lem and Verid go to Urulan if they chose; Raincloud was no pawn in this game.

As she approached the door through the hall of cultural displays, someone stepped out in her path. It was a goddess; or rather, an Urulite female, draped in a black hooded cloak, holding a white mask on a stick before her face. At her wrists and ankles jeweled bracelets jingled as she moved, like the clanking of chains, Raincloud thought. But the female stood fearlessly, leaning toward Raincloud’s face as if to get a close look at her. Five long seconds passed thus; then the Urulite female withdrew. As she turned, Raincloud caught just a glimpse behind her mask of her dark eye with long black lashes, before she disappeared behind the screen of Azhragh and Mirhiah.

Chapter 8

Verid Anaeashon sat in a secluded garden at the heart of the Nucleus.

The heliconians swirled overhead, their long narrow wings flashing iridescent blue as they settled upon the passionflowers. Verid watched them sip their nectar, then lap up pollen, too, the high protein food they needed to last their six-month lifespan. Then they rose in flight, trembling like an arpeggio in a concert hall.

At the right end of the mooncurve sat the Prime Guardian Hyen Helishon, the golden sash draped across his plump figure, and between them Verid’s immediate superior, the Subguardian for Foreign Affairs, Flors Helishon. Flors was lean, his cheeks slightly sunken, fair-haired with startling blue eyes—the only thing startling about him, Verid thought.

They were gathered for their daily staff conference. Sharer relations were snarled again over the fruit flies in Papilion, and L’li’s newly announced tariff on imported rice threatened to spark an interworld trade crisis. Yet unexpected hope arose from, of all things, Raincloud’s little “duel” with the Urulite warlord.

But any meeting of substance required reflection, and must commence by viewing the butterflies. These flashy heliconians, their blue wings barred red and edged white, were the favorite of the Prime Guardian; whereas Verid, even after so many centuries, longed for the subtle hues of the leafwings. Nonetheless, she had adapted, learning to release herself and let her lifetime rise upward upon those tiny wings. Her hands relaxed upon her knees, her fingers yielding one by one to memory.

Six centuries before, yet it seemed only last year, she had just “metamorphosed” from the shon, in Anaeaon, home of scholars whose books fluttered as profusely as their butterflies. As her genes predicted, she became a logen. But then, she fell into the arms of Iras, the sparkling visitor from Letheon, and left Anaeaon behind.

As a logen, she took on a Sharer cause: the right of native Sharers to shelter fugitives in the tunnels of their rafts, a tradition dating back to the Valan occupation of Shora. The treaty gave their Sharer hosts the right to harbor even the worst violator of Elysian law. She had won the case; and yet, the friends she had lost... Her eyes burned at the memory, and the flitting shapes blurred before her.

Two centuries later, as if it were yesterday, Verid had returned to the Anaeashon as its generen. As generen she had watched her own shonlings grow up and metamorphose, and face heartbreaks of their own. Another two centuries yet, and one of hers, an extraordinary gray-haired child, had succeeded her there.... She watched a heliconian take off with its nectar, leaving but a shivering leaf behind.

And then, eight years ago, a mere eyeblink, Hyen Helishon had rotated to Prime, and he called on her to join his staff. Hyen’s star had risen, and hers as well, as they knit the strands of peace and prosperity. But like lightning, what springs up quickly must soon fade away.... With a shudder, she lost the soaring butterfly among hundreds.

The spell was broken. She saw Hyen’s hands trembling, for he was moved by his own recollections. How solitary we are, Verid thought, each one of us with our layered histories floating in the sea of time.

Between them, Flors stretched his arms and straightened his back. Clearing his throat, the Subguardian looked sideways at Hyen.

Hyen nodded slightly. “Well, Flors?”

“The Sharers are responsible, all right.” Flors referred to the fruit flies in Papilion.

“They admit it?”

“Of course not. The webfingered women all enter whitetrance the minute we set foot on their raft. Why would they do that, if they’re not the culprits?”

Verid said quietly, “The Sharers on the raft outside Papilion have ‘unspoken’ Elysian visitors for the past year, well before the fruit flies appeared.” The plague of fruit flies had now spread throughout the floating city.

“The gene analysis is conclusive,” Flors added. “The flies carry the telltale DNA prints of Sharer lifeshaping.” Lifeshapers were the Sharer gene-engineers, whose ancestors had first taught the Heliconians. “It’s time to tell them: Clean up the flies, or else.”

Verid’s lips parted, about to mention the long-standing Sharer grievance about noise pollution. But she saw Hyen lift his head with a thoughtful tightening of the lips, and she kept silent.

“I wonder,” said Hyen. “A quick move is rarely the best response to Sharer trouble.”

“True,” admitted Flors. “It only rewards them.”

“They take us for children.”

Verid smiled to herself. She recalled the Sharer proverb about a hatchling squid—”Ink first, think next.”

“Those flies aren’t exactly lethal, are they?” Hyen added. “Why not raise this at the Sharer World Gathering?”

The Sharers of Shora gathered yearly, sending delegates from rafts all around the ocean. They met at Kshiri-el, a raft descended from historic Raia-el, whose Gathering had led the resistance against Valan invaders before the Heliconians came. The World Gathering took up all sorts of issues, including disputes among raft Gatherings, as well as differences with Elysium. It would meet again in just over half a year.

Flors looked relieved. “The World Gathering—Verid can handle that.” Verid always represented Elysium at the Sharer World Gathering. Flors considered Sharers a domestic nuisance, preferring for himself the “real” foreign affairs of Valedon and L’li.

“The L’liite tariff,” said Hyen, taking up another subject. “What do you recommend?”

The L’liites had just slapped a tariff on imported grain. Bronze Sky and other agricultural worlds strongly opposed the tax. Valedon, of course, opposed any restriction on trade.

“We can’t accept the tariff,” said Flors. “It’s contrary to the spirit of the Free Fold.”

Verid asked, “What about those new loans you’ve approved? Perhaps L’li needs the revenue to pay them back.”

Flors gave her a meaningful stare. They all knew that Iras had negotiated the loans. Elysium was a small world. “It is up to Bank Helicon to get their money back. In the meantime, how many L’liites will starve if grain prices rise any higher?”

Verid was silent. She had opposed the L’liite loans, distrustful of the last two generations of L’liite leadership. Over six centuries together, one was bound to disagree with one’s mate now and then.

“Right,” agreed Hyen at last. Elysian opposition would probably weight the balance; L’li would rescind the tax. “Anything new on the Urulite incident?” Hyen referred to the destroyed freighter.

“No,” said Flors. “Only the so-called invitation from the Legate for Cultural Affairs.”

“Ah yes.” Hyen grinned. “Ready to hop a ship to the Azure Throne?”

Flors ignored the Prime Guardian’s remark. “An ‘invitation,’ to a newly hired foreigner, at the end of a drunken feast. When no outsider has penetrated Urulan in two centuries. What do they take us for?”

Urulan had closed itself to outsiders, shortly after the Free Fold was formed. Who could have foreseen how long that self-imposed isolation would last, and how virulent a direction their people would take? Even Verid had been shocked; Elysians found it hard to remember how swiftly the populations of other worlds turned over, forgetting the gains of their ancestors.

Flors went on. “Verid should never have called him in. I opposed calling him in, you may recall. I opposed even the appearance of acknowledging any official status of that legation, which has long outstayed its permit.”

The Urulite legation had originally come as part of an interstellar children’s craft fair organized by the generen of the Helishon. The generen—either out of uncanny foresight or incurable naïveté, Verid had never decided which—had sent an invitation to Urulan. Urulan’s acceptance, and request for a visa for its delegates, had caused shock waves in Foreign Affairs. Verid had fought hard for approval, and Flors never forgave her. But after they came, the bureaucracy conveniently never got around to sending them home. The craft exhibitors had left, but the Legation stayed on, in the hands of the astute Lord Zheron.

“The legation covers espionage,” Flors insisted. “Day and night, Zheron taps our transmissions and reports to the Imperium.”

Verid murmured, “The spy is spied upon.” What better way to gain insight into a closed world?

“This would be a good time to deport them,” said Flors. “While memory of the Valan freighter is fresh, even the generen and other bleeding hearts will have little to say. I’ve begun the paperwork; I await only your word, Guardian.”

Verid’s pulse quickened, but she did not rise to the bait. Bickering between subordinates only irritated Hyen.

Hyen pursed his lips and looked around at the passionflowers, as if the matter were of small consequence to him. “You’re right, Flors. Ruthless bastards, those Urulites, nipping a freighter in free space. Still, prudence, you’re always telling me. Do a study, analyze, prioritize. Let’s have Foreign Affairs conduct a study on the costs and benefits of closing out the Urulite legation.”

Flors stiffened, and the hollows deepened in his cheeks. Then he shrugged. “At the very least we must put out a statement, since an official representative of our office visited the legation—without my approval, I may add.”

This last Verid could not let stand. “The translator Raincloud Windclan is only support staff. No approval was needed.”

Hyen waved an impatient hand. “Read me your statement, Flors.”

Flors took a lightbox from his pocket and read from the screen. “The Urulites are attempting to paper over their guilt by effusions of false goodwill. The reports we hear from refugees of that desperate world only confirm the impossibility of serious contacts. Any official exchange with the Imperium would have to meet these preconditions: acknowledge and pay reparations for the Valan freighter; cease genocidal repression of rebel provinces; return, in person or remains, the thousand or more foreigners taken prisoner over the last two centuries; accept investigation by the Free Fold Humane Commission of charges of slavery, bestiality, and abuse of women...”

Well familiar with the list, Verid listened in silence. Flors was right, of course, in every detail. And yet, how little he knew of humanity. If people were music, Flors would be “unmusical.”

Hyen nodded. “Sounds good to me. Anything you’d care to add, Verid?”

“‘Nonetheless,’” she added, “‘the Republic of Elysium aspires to peaceful relations with every inhabited world, including Urulan, and will pursue every reasonable avenue toward that end.’”

“Excellent. That wraps it up, I’d say, Flors.”

Flors lifted his head and straightened his arms, as if to rise. “With your permission, Guardian; I have another conference shortly, with Guardian Tenarishon.” Jerya Tenarishon, the most formidable woman in the Guard of Twelve. What was her concern? The other Guardians were poking into foreign policy, nowadays, instead of leaving it to the Prime Guardian as they used to. Hyen’s support was faltering, for several reasons... She would try again to warn him.

As he rose, Flors turned to Verid. “If you’re really thinking of visiting the Azure Throne,” he warned contemptuously, “you might think again. The moment you or that foreign translator sets foot on Urulan, you become the property of the first man who sets a hand upon you.”

“I’ll remember,” Verid dryly assured him. “In Raincloud’s Hills, a similar fate would be yours.”

Hyen laughed hard, his abdomen shaking. After his Sub-guardian had departed he shook his head. “Quite a list,” he said, as if admiring such a catalog of depravity.

“No one deplores it more than I,” said Verid with feeling. “Nevertheless, none of our many problems with Urulan can be solved, so long as Urulan considers us a foreign enemy and we view them as the fount of all evil.”

“I agree. The question is, can this Lord Zheron be taken seriously? By the way, you win your point: Raincloud’s gender was no obstacle.”

“That only shows how desperate they are to make contact. As for Zheron, he affects flamboyance, but he takes only water after the first drink.”

“What exactly did he say when you called him in?” Hyen asked.

“He said that the freighter attack was a mistake on the part of someone in the Imperial Command, and that it triggered a major upheaval in the regime.”

“How generous of him.”

“There’s probably some truth to it. A couple of their generals have dropped out of sight.”

“And you replied?”

“I offered, in confidence, to send an emissary any time they’re ready. Without preconditions.” Exactly what Zheron now requested. Her pulse rate increased.

“Let’s hope he keeps it confidential. Or Foreign Affairs will put the heat on us.”

The heat would turn on Verid, of course, not on the Prime Guardian.

“Tell him we’re interested,” Hyen said, “off the record, of course, at the same time that the Foreign Affairs statement goes out. Then, after a decent interval, send that translator back for another chat.”

She had known all along that Hyen would assent, but still, it came as a relief. Relaxing, she let herself breathe in the scent of passionflowers. “So far, so good. One step at a time,” she cautioned. Nothing would change overnight.

“Yes, yes. Prudence,” Hyen muttered, motioning to a servo. The servo brought a tray of delicacies, from which he helped himself to a pair of protein-rich floral cakes. All Elysian food was processed by molecular synthesis from recycled organics. Hyen ate thoughtfully, lifting his gaze to the butterflies. “If there’s one thing I’d like to do in my time, it’s to visit the Imperator.”

Verid hid a smile. “Imperator” was an overblown title, she thought, for the tyrannical ruler of a rather backward planet. Yet the centuries of isolation had cast an attractive spell on Urulan; its bizarre fauna and outlandish customs had caught the imagination of many an outsider. Who could resist the mystery of the Imperator of the Azure Throne, his visage never recorded? She helped herself to a synthetic carrot, delicately carved into a tree of curlicues. As the servo waiter passed, she nodded her head with a whispered thanks.

“Such courtesy,” teased Hyen. Verid was often ridiculed for her politeness to servos, as if she took them for people. Better that, she countered, than mistaking people for servos. Hyen rose to go. “I don’t suppose,” he added in the same jocular tone, “you’ll be joining our little ‘outing’ on your Visiting Day.”

Hyen’s little “outings” were notorious. His taste includes women and men, of varied physique and often questionable character, and the party might last for days on end. To a point, his exploits had only enhanced his stature; but of late, the extra medical fees had grown embarrassing. “No, thanks,” she replied. “Do watch yourself—the logens, you know.”

“Yes, my good generen.”

Hyen’s remark recalled Verid’s decades as a “parent,” the generen of the Anaeashon. It occurred to Verid that her old gray-haired shonling had scheduled a logathlon that afternoon. Kal had taken on a prominent medical researcher, of all things. She would view the match that evening with Iras, providing no new interstellar crisis intervened before then.

The logathlon took place at the oldest public butterfly garden in Helicon. Trees entwined with passionflowers cut through several street levels; the scent was overpowering, even from the upper street level where Blackbear and the lab students watched. A shimmering cloud of heliconians enveloped the trees. Amidst the trees lay a small theater, where the choice seats were paid for. Most of the voting audience watched from afar by holo stage.

The lab students had set up a holostage which showed Tulle and her opponent at close range. Tulle wore her full train, glittering with pink and silver-winged amaryllis. The logen, Kal Anaeashon, wore stark white as before, with only the single dead leaf at his throat. What a contrast to his shonsib Alin, arrayed in richly embroidered leafwings, sitting now with Blackbear and the lab students. Alin leaned his head on his fist, lost in thought. A heliconian fluttered up to the rail, its golden wings ribbed in black.

“Tulle Meryllishon, Director of Developmental Medicine,” Kal began. “Your awards and achievements in your field are so well-known, it would be superfluous to list them here.”

“To list yours, logen, would take the next hour,” rejoined Tulle, her face above the holostage calm and confident.

At her rejoinder Onyx laughed, and Sunflower laughed, too, just for the fun of it. “Kal gets teaching awards about every other year,” added Onyx. “It’s become an embarrassment.”

“His students are all hypnotized,” muttered Draeg.

Blackbear frowned, trying to hear what was going on. After all, if the vote went badly, the Guard could shut down Tulle’s research program.

“Can you explain to us,” Kal was saying, “what your research is about, and why the Guard supports it?”

“With pleasure,” said Tulle. “The aim of our work is to improve and perfect the process by which Elysian embryos develop into shonlings. Our previous achievements include a fifty percent decrease in defectives, a thirty percent decrease in advanced morbidity, and an estimated twenty-five percent increase in longevity. Science offers endless potential to improve our quality of life.”

“Improved quality of life?”

“Exactly. Better regeneration of bone, so the structures don’t buckle after a thousand years; more resilient tissues of heart and brain, for increased survival following accidental injury; again, I could easily fill the hour. In short—my work directly extends that of the Heliconian Doctors who founded the first shon.”

“Improved quality of life,” Kal repeated. “Might that include... the ability to conceive offspring?”

At this Pirin and Lorl stirred and muttered together.

“‘Offspring,’” repeated Alin at Blackbear’s shoulder, emphasizing the Elysian word. “The word means ‘animal progeny.’”

“An insult,” said Onyx. “Shonlings are for people. But then, natural born children wouldn’t be shonlings, would they?” Elysians had no word for human-born children.

Tulle was describing the Fertility Project. “A small fraction of our work is aimed at germ-line generation of ageless progeny. This project is of great interest, from the scientific perspective; and it attracts attention from foreigners across the Fold.”

“Foreign attention, that’s good, Tulle,” added Alin as he watched. A logen himself, he had coached her for the encounter. “Elysians love foreign attention and prestige; the voters will be impressed.”

Meanwhile below, Kal continued easily, as if it were just another conversation. “Tell me something. A beautiful inscription stands above the door to Science Park. What does it stand for?”

Alin frowned at this departure, and the others drew quiet.

“You know better than I, I’m sure,” Tulle told Kal. “The inscription reads, ‘Where learning is shared, the waterfall breaks through the cataract.’ It’s from The Web.” The ancient book all Elysians were so sensitive about. “Is that translation quite accurate?”

“It is not,” answered Tulle, her voice heightened. “The original Sharer words read, ‘Where learning is shared, the amnion breaks and hope is born.’ You see—because natural birth is alien to us, we reject even the reference to it, even the mention of ‘hope.’ What does this say for us as a people? I say the Heliconian project is incomplete. Let us work to reclaim our birth-right.”

A burst of applause came from the audience below. Above, Pirin and Lorl applauded, too.

“The words were inscribed by the original Heliconian Doctors,” Kal rejoined. “They knew what they were doing. They told us not to hope for children, but instead to lead lives of beauty, beauty unwithered by age and decay, the unfettered beauty of a waterfall.”

Tulle said with impatience, “I see no conflict between beauty and shonlings.”

The audience was quiet now.

“Look at the foreign worlds,” said Kal. “Look at L’li and Valedon, where children enter life not in shons, but in ‘families,’” he said, using a Valan word. “Wherever families exist, there is poverty and violence. Poverty, because the vast majority of families can never support themselves above subsistence level; and violence, because men fight on behalf of their families. Ask any good soldier what he fights for, if not the good of his family.”

Blackbear blinked at this. Whatever could that logen be talking about?

Hawktalon crept behind him and leaned her chin on his shoulder. “Daddy, are they done yet?”

“Sh, I’m trying to hear,” he replied hurriedly.

“I’m done playing.”

“Go play with Doggie.”

“Doggie’s done playing, too...”

Below, Kal was saying, “That is why Elysium was founded such that reproduction belonged to the Republic, through the shons, of course. All of our children belong to us; collectively, we ensure their material welfare and security. It is no accident that our people have achieved unprecedented civilization, envied by all other worlds. And peace—the Free Fold itself was conceived here.”

Onyx commented, “The Sharers had more to do with that. He should know better.”

Above the holostage Tulle leaned forward. “Are you saying that families cause war?”

“The history of our species, and of our brother apes as well, is that families kill other families. But in Elysian society, the community as a whole provides for our young citizens, and rears just enough of them for each calling. It is no accident that we have outgrown murder and warfare.”

Tulle paused, apparently taken aback by this argument. Blackbear was so beside himself, he could hardly listen. “How can anyone say such things?” he demanded of Onyx. “He wouldn’t even know what a family is.”

Tulle responded at last, “What about Sharer families? The Sharers practically invented ‘peace.’”

So did Clicker families, thought Blackbear. Clickers had emigrated from L’li precisely to avoid its wars and famines. Clickers had always lived in peace.

“The Sharers,” said Kal, “regulate their families strictly by their Gatherings. In effect, they are one decentralized shon.”

“We can regulate our families, too,” said Tulle. “Regulation is up to the Guardians. My concern is science, not politics.”

“Very well,” said Kal, “let’s talk science. You’ve just hired a foreign doctor to redesign a human gene to enable ageless females to ovulate...”

The logen must be referring to him. Blackbear gripped the rail to stare at Kal below. Then he returned to the close-up view. The man’s face unnerved him; such calm features, saying such outrageous things.

“Are they done yet, Dad?” whined Hawktalon.

Draeg handed the girl a lightcube. She grasped it eagerly, watching the channels change to various research files. “Where’s the castle game, Uncle Draeg?” Sunflower toddled over on tiptoe to peer over her arm.

“... does the young doctor realize what it would take to implement such a treatment on his home world? First, even once ovulation is possible, all embryos will have to be transferred to a shon for anti-aging treatment, even if they are returned to their families at term. The cost of a shon to treat fifty children per year would exceed the budget of Founders City.”

Tulle replied, “You have only moved from Elysian politics to interworld politics. Worse, you make the patronizing assumption that foreign scientists are naive and cannot think two steps ahead.”

“Exactly,” observed Onyx. “You tell him, Tulle.”

Blackbear nodded vigorously, while Draeg muttered some L’liite phrase that was no compliment.

In the visi-monitor, Kal was shaking his head. A wisp of his gray hair stirred in a slight breeze; an extra air current must have turned on. “Remember that we Elysians remain foreign scientists on Shora; the Sharer treaty so states. The Sharers originally gave us their science—at a price: No application of that science may threaten the equilibrium of our common biosphere. Has the Sharer World Gathering looked at your work?”

Alin clapped his hands to his head. “Great Helix—the Sharer World Gathering? He won’t take it there?”

“Shora,” whispered Onyx. “The Sharers will tie us in knots for years.”

Chapter 9

After the logathlon three days would elapse before the vote was tallied. If the vote favored Kal, the question of Tulle’s research support would be placed on the agenda of the Guard of Twelve.

“I can’t understand it,” Blackbear told her. Tulle was watching letters appear above a holostage in the lab, the results of the DNA sequence analysis of some of Blackbear’s Eyeless alleles. “How does he get away with such lies?”

“Foreigners don’t vote,” she answered succinctly. “Think of it. If you were infertile, wouldn’t you like to come up with a reason why it’s morally superior? Elysians readily swallow that argument.”

“Some do, you mean,” said Pirin indignantly. “What are the shons, if not twelve quarreling families? Are private families any worse?”

“Do the shons quarrel?” Blackbear asked with interest. Clicker families were full of quarrels, about runaway livestock, and husband-prices, and babies desired by childless relatives. For the villagers, it was great entertainment. Of course, Blackbear and Raincloud, returning from the University, had kept above that sort of thing.

“Sure they do,” said Pirin. “There’s all sorts of rivalry between shons. Ask Alin—much as he detests Kal, his shonsib, you couldn’t get him to admit that anyone outshines an Anaeashon. We must spend half our gross income on athletics and art contests. It doesn’t lead to war and murder.”

Blackbear agreed. “Clickers don’t have murderers, either. We teach our youngsters spiritual defense.”

“I don’t know,” Lorl said thoughtfully. Lorl studied gene expression in advanced age; she herself avoided the fertility project. “It takes much skill to be a generen, to teach shonlings the heights of beauty and civility. I don’t know that just anyone should do it.”

“What are you saying, Lorl?” Pirin demanded. “You think I’m not smart enough to raise a shonling?”

“I’m not sure I’d be smart enough—or wise enough.”

“Where Blackbear lives, anyone can raise a shonling upon reaching puberty. It doesn’t lead to barbarism.”

“That’s true,” Blackbear agreed. “But we do get lots of help from our uncles and grandparents, and of course the High Priestess.”

“None of which we have,” said Lorl. “That’s why the generen is such a crucial position.”

Pirin laughed. “The generen’s just a political appointee. Anybody could do the job.”

Tulle looked back from the DNA sequences. “If that’s true,” she said, exasperated, “then Kal is right, that reproduction belongs to the Republic! You’ve argued yourself into a circle, Pirin. Now I see Kal’s true plan: to get all of us so tied up in politics that we leave off from our experiments.”

The vote on the logathlon favored Tulle by a narrow margin. The students were relieved because now Kal could not call on her again for another six months, and they could get back to their work. Only Blackbear was not inclined to let the matter drop, particularly since the reporter servos, having figured out who the “foreign doctor” was, had come to pester him.

“They say he’s taken it to the Sharers,” Blackbear warned.

“Bad news,” Draeg agreed. “Let’s get as much done as we can, before we hear from them.”

“Can’t we demand a rematch?” he wanted to know. “I’d like to tell that logen a thing or two.”

“What?” exclaimed Draeg. “You, take on the Killer? You’re nuts.” He punched Blackbear in the arm.

“You can’t,” Onyx explained. “Only a logen can call a public logathlon; otherwise there’d be chaos. Don’t think Alin’s not tempted—but even he knows better.”

“Why is everyone so afraid of Kal,” said Blackbear irritably. “I’m not afraid to set the record straight. He’s just a man.”

“Go tell him yourself,” said Onyx. “You’ll have to visit his mate, first; his servo, that is. He calls her ‘Cassi.’” Onyx chuckled, and Blackbear wondered what was so funny about that.

Then he remembered: “Cassi Deathsister” was the name of an ancient Valan exile among the Sharers, the narrator of The Web. Kal certainly had a warped sense of humor.

Draeg snapped his fingers. “Why not call a hearing? Anyone can do that. We’ve done it lots of times, for the simbrid question and other things.”

Onyx agreed. “A hearing helps diffuse the issue. Hold enough hearings, and they’ll be too bored to watch the logathlon next time.”

“How does a ‘hearing’ work?” asked Blackbear.

“Just announce one, over the network,” Onyx said. “Invite whoever you want; Alin, for instance, would speak well. But any citizen, invited or not, is welcome to show up and have his say.”

“The only catch is, it’s open-ended,” said Draeg. “You have to stay as long as they want to talk. It can last for days.”

“Not for us,” said Onyx. “Our longest was five hours, on the simbrid question. The longer hearings are usually border disputes.” Even on an ocean world, cities managed to argue over their borders.

“Can I invite Kal, too?” asked Blackbear.

“Sure.” Onyx laughed again. “You’ll be sorry, though.”

So Blackbear went ahead and scheduled a hearing to explain his research on egg development. The obliging servo voice at the holostage helped him send “invitations” and post notices in the public register. He took a moment at his terminal to peruse the register, to see what else was going on. Sure enough, there was a hearing on Helicon’s northern border with Papilion, out in the ocean somewhere. What purpose could such a “border” serve? Fishing rights? Another hearing was about international lending—sponsored by Bank Helicon, Blackbear noted with a smile. Another, on “exploitation of foreign workers,” caught his eye. Perhaps he ought to attend that one.

Meanwhile, Tulle asked him to take his analysis of Eyeless down to the molecular level. So Onyx helped him “expand” the model embryo until the very chromosomes within a single cell extended around him.

The Eyeless DNA specified a protein which Onyx optimistically called “ovogen.” In germ cells, ovogen appeared to regulate several steps in the formation of egg cells. But of course, the same DNA sequence is present in every cell of the body. Other cells made slightly different versions of “ovogen” to regulate different developmental steps in outer eye tissues, heart muscle, and a host of other mesodermal structures. Ovogen’s function in the other organs was unknown.

In order to make ovogen, the gene had to direct synthesis of an RNA copy; this RNA migrates to the ribosome, a factory which puts together the protein. All of this happens inside each microscopic cell. The cell contents are laced with a network of vesicles and channels which transport the protein to its site of action; this “endoplasmic reticulum” had actually inspired the design of the Helicon transit reticulum.

Of course, the gene for ovogen had to be under strict control, because cells have to become eggs only in the ovaries, and only at the right time in development. It would not do for humans to have egg cells sprouting out of all parts of the body, like a flowering plant. So a dozen other genes specify control proteins that bind to the ovogen gene, preventing or activating the copying of RNA. Some of these control proteins have other functions; for instance growth hormone, which maintains youthful muscle strength, but loses its effect in later life. Growth hormone and other control proteins had been “corrected” by the Heliconian gene engineers. But this “correction” had left ovogen “turned off”—permanently. No ovogen RNA was copied; no protein was made; and no germ cells migrated to become egg cells in otherwise healthy ovaries.

Onyx had mutated the control site of Eyeless, hoping to restore its response to the binding proteins. Now Blackbear could test the mutations for expression of ovogen, first in the model, then in tissue culture.

Hawktalon soon learned to set up tissue cultures, and progressed to programming the apparatus for protein assays. She was also good at keeping an eye on the equipment, to make sure the servo did not change its mind for some reason and start assaying some unknown protein. Much impressed, Tulle offered to put her on the payroll one day a week, the maximum allowed for shonlings. Blackbear was grateful for the extra income, and Raincloud was proud to see her firstborn doing something as responsible as herding goats.

Now that the simulator was working again at full capacity, Onyx maintained it strictly. A list of “don’ts” appeared on the console, including, “Don’t swear at machine; scatology disorients the network.” Draeg got the simulator to image the cardiac fibers developing in his heartless mutants. What he found was so exciting that he managed to persuade Pirin to test his mutations in a live simbrid embryo.

One day Draeg arrived in lab looking strangely sick, his complexion darkened to a dusky violet. Blackbear eyed him with concern. “You getting enough sleep, Brother?” he asked in L’liite.

At that Onyx laughed and slapped her knees. “Draeg’s okay—he’s gone native! Breathmicrobes,” she explained. “You know, that’s how the Sharers swim underwater an hour at a time. The microbes in their skin absorb oxygen from the water. A good thing, when you live out alone on a raft. Does it work, Draeg?”

“It does,” Draeg told her. “So far I’ve doubled my time underwater, and it should get even better. I’ve been trying to screw up my nerve for this all year. You should try it, Brother.” He gave Blackbear a friendly shove. “Don’t worry, my little bacteria aren’t that contagious. Hey, you’ve got to sail out to my raft and see.”

At the Nucleus, Raincloud translated Imperial broadcasts and awaited word from Verid on Lord Zheron’s invitation. Lem was anxious too, for he hoped to accompany Verid to Urulan. Raincloud considered warning him not to offer himself to Urulite females—he’d survive about five seconds, she thought.

But only Flors’s statement came out, a blast at the Imperium, barely softened at the end. Lem shook his head. “It will all come to nothing, if Flors has his way and kicks the legation out.”

Why do that? she wondered. The internal politics of Helicon still puzzled her. By now, most of the Subguardian’s associates were preoccupied with the L’liite tariff plan.

At home, it occurred to Raincloud that her cycle was more than a month overdue. Her breasts felt tender, and she woke up queasy early in the morning.

“Do you think you could teach the kitchen to make my ‘corncrunch’?” Raincloud asked Blackbear at breakfast. “I’d like to keep some in my pocket, and on the night table.”

“Of course, dear,” he said, looking up hopefully. Corncrunch was a mixture of cracked corn coated with honey, which Raincloud had snacked on to steady her stomach before. “Are you carrying again?”

“Goddess willing.”

His eyes widened. “Another little one! What good news for the clan.” He came back and hugged her, fondly running her beaded braids through his fingers. “We’ll need to find a doctor,” he added. He had delivered infants himself in Tumbling Rock, but it was unwise to treat one’s own family.

She smiled meditatively. In the Hills, it was said that the Dark Goddess is reborn in every womb. And in The Web, the great wordweaver said, “The mother is born in her child.”

Sunflower, who had woken early that morning, crawled sleepily into her lap and rubbed his head against her breast. “Milk, Mother?” he muttered, his voice muffled by the thumb in his mouth.

At that she winced, knowing she had to give up the token nursing for the sake of the unborn. “I’ll read you your rabbit book, Sunny.” She would get the kitchen window to print out a shelf full of bright new storybooks for him.

While Sunflower tiptoed off to fetch his book, she noticed Hawktalon looking at her oddly. “Is it true?” the girl asked in a muffled voice. “Another little Sunflower?”

“Or another girl,” said Raincloud. “But don’t mind about it now, dear. Besides, it’s not yet quickened.” For Clickers, the conceptus had no “personhood” until it quickened; the mother might keep it or not, before then. Of course, Raincloud wanted her child.

Still, Hawktalon’s eyes blinked fast, and her face seemed to struggle between a smile and a scowl.

“What’s wrong, Hawk?” Blackbear asked softly.

She burst out, “Will I still get my birthday?”

“Of course you will, dear,” her parents both exclaimed. Raincloud shook her head. “Wherever did she get that notion?”

“It’s right on our calendar,” Blackbear insisted, “three days from now.”

“You said time was money,” Hawktalon explained, “and money was short. And babies take up both.”

“Excuse me, Citizens,” interrupted the house. “Prepare to receive a transfold interstellar call.”

“Transfold?” exclaimed Raincloud. “You mean, from Bronze Sky?”

“Calling party, Nightstorm Windclan. Do you wish the barrier removed?”

“Goddess, yes—right away!”

The wall of nanoplast surrounding the holostage began to melt away, as the Windclans hurried into the sitting room. A column of light grew above the holostage, flickering confusedly. At last the connection steadied. Raincloud’s sister appeared, flanked by her two turbaned husbands, Tallwheat and Halfmoon, and their five children. Nightstorm wore her braids in a striking crossed-diamond pattern, which Tallwheat was particularly skilled at making. The girls, too, had all their dark coils newly done up. Their expectant faces all shone with the rich darkness of fertile soil, none of those pasty Elysian complexions.

Suddenly all their eyes widened and mouths fell open, as if the Bronze Skyans had just caught sight of Raincloud’s family on the stage. The children smiled and held out their dolls, except for the littlest in Tallwheat’s arm, who screeched and buried his face in his father’s chest.

“There’s the birthday girl!” Nightstorm called to Hawktalon, in her full contralto voice. “Five years old! You didn’t think we’d forget, did you?” Five Bronze Skyan years, a bit over seven years standard.

“You surprised us, all right,” said Raincloud. “You’re three days—”

“Just because you’re out on some other planet?” Nightstorm went on, as if Raincloud’s words had not yet reached her. “We scheduled it weeks ahead; nearly missed our time, too, because one horse is lame. Did you eat your cake yet?”

Suddenly Raincloud realized. She clapped her hand to her head. “We’re three days behind. We forgot, Shora’s day is longer.”

“Yes,” said Blackbear, shaking his head, “the Elysians stretch out their ‘hours’ to compensate. No wonder we’re off.”

As their words reached her, Nightstorm looked puzzled. “Three days behind? A day’s a day, isn’t it? Anyway—say, Hawk, did your present arrive yet?”

Nightstorm, who had quit school early to help their mother build up the livestock, had little patience for the world beyond Tumbling Rock. No matter, she managed one of the wealthier clans of the Hills.

“Not yet,” said Hawktalon eagerly. “What is it?”

“It’s a surprise, of course.”

“It’s a stethoscope!” shouted Nightstorm’s younger daughter.

Tallwheat gave the girl a squeeze. “Don’t be rude to your mother.”

Nightstorm chuckled. “She’s got the clan’s stubborn streak. Well, Hawk, you’ll grow up to be a doctor, too. Your father’s a good one, and as a goddess, you’ll do even better.”

“I won’t be just a doctor,” Hawktalon announced solemnly. “I’ll be a linguist.”

The children back on Bronze Sky squirmed and fidgeted, awaiting her delayed reply. Nightstorm’s daughter looked up at her mother. “‘Linguist’? What’s a linguist, Mother?”

Nightstorm shook her head. “Such fancy notions. Be good like your mother, Hawk; don’t forget the clan.”

Raincloud winced, feeling sorry for Halfmoon, who turned his head away. Halfmoon originally had married their sister Running Wolf, the “white goat” of the clan. Everyone had hoped the marriage would settle her down, but instead she had run off to Founders City to make her fortune in trade. So Nightstorm had remarried Halfmoon, to preserve the clan’s honor; but their sister was forever lost to them. It happened; there were one or two in every clan.

“How’s Mother, and Dad?”

“They’re fine, and Clanmother’s getting on as if she were twenty years younger. Before I forget, I bagged the pair of double-horned goats you wanted, off the slope behind Crater Lake. I shipped them just as you said...”

“Great, thanks!” Raincloud had hit upon the rare goat variety, found only on the Bronze Sky, as a return gift for Blackbear’s lab director, who ran a preserve. She could always count on her first-sister, never fail.

“Goats?” repeated Hawktalon hopefully. “Can you ship me my goats, too?”

“... we all miss you so much,” Nightstorm was saying. “You’re famous around here; I don’t know any Clicker family that’s traveled so far—”

The image shivered and faded out. Sunflower ran to the holostage and scrabbled over it, as if trying to find where his cousins had got to. Doggie crept over the stage, too; the trainsweep seemed to delight in imitating everything the two-year-old did.

The double-horned goats arrived in time for Raincloud’s next Visiting Day, when she visited Tulle Meryllishon in order to return her mate’s courtesy. None the worse for their voyage across the Fold, the spindly-legged animals stretched their necks to feed, their ears pointing straight out sideways like the arms of a toddler. The goats delighted Tulle, who rubbed her hand in their coarse white hair and rubbed the emerging horns. Her capuchin, too, was entranced, scampering up to ride the back of the ram. Hawktalon, who had come along with Raincloud, busily told the Elysian what forage the goats like best, and how to inspect their hooves for disease; in the end, she could barely let them go.

“This is where we ought to live, Mother,” said Hawktalon, jumping with excitement. “We could have our flock, then. Please?”

Raincloud swallowed her embarrassment. “We’ll be home again in a year, dear.”

Tulle smiled. “You are lucky, to live among such beautiful animals. Would you like to see the rest of mine?”

They toured the preserve, seeing animals and foliage saved from all the worlds before terraforming. From L’li, three-limbed one-eyed tree climbers writhed along branches in search of fruit; the tree climber would bore through the shell and insert its stomach to digest the juices. From Bronze Sky, ethereal gliding creatures with scissor-shaped jaws circled over a stream, waiting to pounce on swimming things. Raincloud recalled the look in the eyes of the Sharer envoy to her world, and it brought a chill to her heart. All these creatures had died, that humans might inhabit L’li and Bronze Sky.

There were creatures, too, from dead Torr: zebras, wolves, and cheetahs, species never brought to terraformed worlds. All roamed freely in spacious enclosures landscaped to resemble the original habitats, as far as they could be reconstructed. And then, Tulle showed them, with particular pride, the gorillas.

Raincloud felt her heart beat faster. It seemed indecent, somehow, to think she might see a reminder of Rhun. But she followed Tulle to the tree-lined enclosure.

The dark thick-furred apes lay in a heap on top of one another, seeming to enjoy each other’s company. A grizzled old grandmother stared out at Raincloud, shrewdly, she thought. The creature sat on her haunches, twisting a stick between her wrinkled black fingers with their rounded nails. The flat nose and cavernous nostrils, the thin, smooth lips, the striking eyes set deep within a surprisingly hairless face—Homo gorilla, once assigned a genus distinct from human, now shared the genus Homo. Their genetic code had long ago betrayed their closeness, a closeness which unscrupulous humans now abused. And yet, she found herself asking, should she regret the ancestry of her beloved teacher?

Rhun, of course, had only distant descent from gorillas; his thickened eye sockets and thin lips had hinted of it. But she recalled the hands of the servant at Lord Zheron’s table. With a shudder, she turned away.

In the office of the Sub-Subguardian, a document came to life above the table. Elysian documents never stood upon solid ground, Raincloud mused to herself; they hovered unsubstantially, like the words of angels. She straightened her back and viewed the text with a wary eye.

“We’ve accepted Lord Zheron’s invitation to visit Urulan,” Verid told her. “There are conditions, of course,” she said, nodding to the text. “I’d like you to return for more formal discussion.”

“I see.” Raincloud swallowed back a tinge of nausea; she would snack on corncrunch later. By the fourth month it would subside, she reminded herself. “Who exactly has ‘accepted’?”

“The Prime Guardian directed me to accept. This is highly confidential, of course, since the Republic has no relations with Urulan. First, I will visit the Imperium with a small entourage to lay the groundwork. If all goes well, the Prime Guardian will then make a state visit.”

That would shake up the Fold, all right. “You’ll take Lem along, I assume.”

“Zheron expressly asked for you.”

“Out of the question,” said Raincloud. “I am ‘with child.’”

Verid paused, and her face turned blank, as if to hide whatever she might think about Raincloud’s exceptional condition. Then she nodded respectfully and permitted herself a smile. “This is, I confess, a novel concern for me. Nonetheless, gestation takes nine months, does it not? Nothing will happen right away; it may take us weeks, even months, just to negotiate conditions.”

“I will assist you in Helicon,” Raincloud insisted, “as I was hired to do.”

Verid’s eyebrows rose, and her voice intensified. “Are you so sure of your choice? Think, what a historic opportunity to make the world safer for your children.”

“You Elysians have no children to risk.”

“Our shonlings themselves were the first to invite the Urulite delegates to their craft fair.” Verid leaned forward, fixing her gaze on Raincloud. “Zheron has advanced views on the rights of sims. Your teacher risked his life to escape bondage. You can return his legacy.”

Raincloud’s face grew hot, and she took a deep breath. “You know nothing about that.” And yet, she bleakly realized, she had no answer. She owed it to Rhun, and even to that creature in Tulle’s preserve who shared his lineage. If Urulan rejoined the community of worlds, the sims might be freed.

Suddenly she recalled that logathlon. Her anger boiled over. “What do you Elysians know of freedom? For all your wealth, you live in a glass cage. You never sow and reap your own. Where I come from, every family has their own herd of goats and their own hot spring out back to run the generator. What do you think you live for—beauty? Nothing but bread and circuses.”

The Sub-Subguardian lowered her voice meditatively. “There’s the Snake, remember. The Snake brings good, and does not ask why.”

Raincloud felt her skin crawl, and she gripped the arms of her chair. The Snake, caught in the mouth of the six-armed Goddess. How could this Elysian begin to know what the Dark Goddess meant? She stared at the diminutive woman with her thick black eyebrows.

Nightstorm would have gone, if the Goddess called her, as the Snake was called. But how could Raincloud know what she was called for, here, so far from the Hills? And what was the fate of the Snake, if not to be eaten?

Chapter 10

Blackbear returned from the lab at his wits’ end. The simulator was having fits again, and his mutant test would have to be redone. His hearing on the Fertility Project was less than a week off, and he still could not answer all the questions Alin had warned would come up. He had left the diapers home for once, but Sunflower wet his pants three times; the child had regressed completely. And Hawktalon had given up on tissue culture to spend the day with her crayons, drawing goats and stick figures on Doggie’s back. The four of them, including the much-decorated trainsweep, collapsed exhausted in the house.

“What’ll you eat, kids?” muttered Blackbear. At least there was no cooking and cleaning, he reflected; Elysium had its compensations. But what a job he would have unspoiling everyone when the family went home to Tumbling Rock.

The “visit” of Raincloud’s sister had set him wondering again about home. He missed his old clan members keenly, especially his brother Quail with the two pairs of twins. Quail usually remembered to call; but then, it was hard to keep track of men once they married out into different clans.

And how were his patients back in Tumbled Rock getting on with the doctor in the next town? The goddess whose fractured femur he had set just before departure—had it healed up all right? And the young father of four, with testicular cancer—had he kept up his chemotherapy treatments, a day’s journey for each? It felt odd, not to be getting calls at midnight anymore.

When Raincloud at last got back from the Nucleus, she avoided his look, preoccupied. Somehow everyone made it through dinner without mishap, except Sunflower who managed to fall off the chair onto his head.

With the children asleep, Blackbear sank into his bed, his ears still ringing. Raincloud sat by the night table, nibbling a handful of corncrunch to steady her stomach for the night. Her breasts peeped out cheerfully beyond her bare back and shoulders. He watched appreciatively, but doubted he would have the energy to please her tonight.

Raincloud turned her head toward him, the beads swinging back across her neck. “They want me to go to Urulan.”

He blinked at her, perplexed. “Urulan? That’s impossible.”

“Zheron invited me.”

“Well you said no, didn’t you?”

“Sh, keep your voice down,” she whispered, “the holostage might hear you. I could lose my job—”

“You can quit the darn job for all I care,” he exclaimed. “You can’t go off to Urulan and end up in chains. Why don’t you think of us for a change?”

Raincloud straightened her back, and her breasts rose as she took a breath. “Should I shun the volcano’s slope, too? Should I never build a house, for the earthquakes? Blackbear, you know my clan would always provide for you.”

He still felt angry, and yet foolish for losing his temper. “Why should it be you?” he insisted more quietly. “If you farm the slope of the volcano, at least you bring the clan a rich harvest. What is there on cursed Urulan for you?”

“I owe it to Rhun to go. Besides—our clan is part of the universe. If Urulan threatens Elysium with missiles, some day they’ll threaten Bronze Sky, too.”

He had never had a teacher like Rhun, Blackbear reflected; the doctors at the medical school were more formal. He had met the old sim once or twice, an odd sort of fellow who asked unsettling questions. But why should Rhun’s ghost have such a hold on Raincloud? “The universe is none of our business,” he said. “Let the High Priestess speak for the universe.”

“Then why did you come here? Did the High Priestess send you out to find immortality’? Or would she call it blasphemy?”

He did not answer. He had carefully avoided the temple before they left.

“You still have to call on Verid,” Raincloud reminded him. “You tell her yourself.”

Endless Elysian courtesies. “All right,” he muttered. “Let’s get some sleep.” He switched off the light, then turned over away from her on his side, pulling up the coverlet.

The bed dipped as Raincloud got in. “Blackbear,” she whispered, putting a hand on his waist. He could see her hand, as his eyes adjusted to the dim amber night-light provided by the house. He still did not move, for he was too tired and angry. “Blackbear, you know I always think of you first. Right now I want to see the mushroom come up...” Her hand probed insistently, like six hands, he imagined, all six of the Goddess. He felt himself growing warm and hard. For a moment he wanted to cry, then he lost himself in desire.

On his next Visiting Day Blackbear set out for the Nucleus. For once he left the children behind, with Raincloud. At first he panicked every few minutes, feeling certain his empty arms had left something precious behind. He kept telling himself the children would love to have their mother to themselves all day, and Raincloud had sworn she would get Sunflower potty-trained at last.

At Tulle’s suggestion, he had made for Verid an embroidered scene of the Day of the Child, the next holiday of the Clicker year, another five months off in springtime. On that day the High Priestess and all the assistant priestesses of the temple led a great procession of families up the hill to the cave of the Sacred Snake, which the children passed one by one. He had stitched the scene on his Visiting Days, after completing Hawktalon’s last garment. Such handwork was much prized in Elysium, Tulle said.

The scene reminded Blackbear how much he missed the steady march of the year’s seasons. Shora had its seasons too, of course, but no sign of them seemed to penetrate the floating city. The weather rarely entered Elysian conversation. Only Draeg observed that he hardly dared enter the ocean now that the great seaswallowers had arrived along their march from pole to pole, consuming all in their path except the largest rafts. The meadow of raft seedlings that had greeted the Windclans on arrival would soon be cleared.

At the Nucleus, a servo frisked him down, an octopod whose tentacles slithered around him; he repressed the impulse to fend them off with rei-gi. Another servo showed him to the Foreign Affairs sector. He recalled how angry he was; he still could not get over their treatment of Raincloud.

He recognized the Sub-Subguardian immediately, from her appearances on the news. In person, Verid looked even smaller than he had expected. Her eyebrows rose expressively. “My highest duty, to meet you at last,” she said, beckoning him to her office. “Your handwork is famous around Helicon; what a privilege to receive some.”

Blackbear did not know what to say. It was hard to talk back to a goddess, especially one of such authority.

“How is your project?” Verid asked. “Will we have fertile Elysians soon?”

Or ageless offworlders, he added to himself. “The Eyeless gene looks promising,” he admitted.

“Which is...?”

“The gene controls egg development.”

“So in the future, females may be fertile while males are not. What a scandal! That should keep our logens busy.”

“We’re working on the male germ-line, too.”

Verid laughed. “Never mind, it doesn’t take much to keep logens arguing.”

“Well let them have their arguments,” he exclaimed suddenly. “It’s ‘duels to the death’ that worry me. My mate did not come here for any such thing.”

“I suppose not,” said Verid quietly. Her hands rested on the arms of her wooden chair, an unexpected reminder of home. “None of us came into the world expecting to find missiles pointed at us from twenty light-years away.”

Blackbear waved his hand impatiently. “You have to live with volcanoes. It doesn’t mean you have to jump into one.”

Verid’s lips wrinkled, as if restraining a laugh. “I should hope not! Blackbear, I know you think of your children, too. Do you know how many children I have? Over two thousand, from my decades as generen. They’re all grown, now; but somehow, children never fully leave their shon, don’t you think?”

It was true. He still remembered himself in his father’s arms, years after he had moved to Raincloud’s clan. “It’s not the same,” he told her. “Our clan is linked by blood. Besides, you can’t possibly raise two thousand children as you’d raise one. It sounds like the orphanage in Founders City.”

“We are orphans,” she observed. “Daughters and sons of Elysium; but those of us who remember Helix... are orphans.”

Helix, the world that had shared destruction with lethal Torr. His scalp crawled. “Torr was a deathworld, taken over by machines. That can’t happen again.”

Suddenly her face went blank. “Not on Urulan,” she observed. “That, at least, is unlikely. But there are dangers worse...” She smiled again. “What fools we must seem, to you. Yet Urulan is my daily business, just as volcanoes are yours—and I promise, we won’t jump in.” The Sub-Subguardian was deceptively disarming. “I have to take you out somewhere,” said Verid, “or it doesn’t count as ‘visiting.’ If we’re done with confidential matters—have you been to the concert hall?”

Blackbear resigned himself to yet another form of Elysian entertainment. Out in the street-tunnel, Verid in her long train of leafwings might have been just another citizen strolling to view the butterflies, except for her ever present octopod who followed never more than a meter behind.

The concert hall was a vast darkened interior of a sphere, something like a planetarium. Blackbear sat next to Verid, momentarily uneasy at being next to a goddess in the dark. But the auditorium was filling up, after all, and the security octopod dutifully planted itself several seats over. The scents and perfumes were enough to make one swoon.

A sound grew out of the darkness, imperceptible at first, deep enough to be felt in the bones. An earthquake, it seemed at first, but it changed, as new tones came in like distant bells. Then firesparks of light appeared, winking out almost before they had come. At last the sparks showered into the audience, who could actually toss them back into the darkness.

Other pieces followed, a feast for the eyes and ears. Holographic dancers sprang out, as spirited as those who danced for the Goddess; the figures almost seemed to glide into the audience and carry people away. For instrumental works, live players hung suspended overhead, fingering their flutes and strings. The texture of their music was familiar to Blackbear, though the particular instruments were foreign. The servo announcer noted with pride that Elysians had designed more than a hundred new electromechanical instruments throughout their history.

The final work started off somewhat like the first, with a low, barely perceptible line of sound. But this line traced a melody, as simple as the ones children sing. One by one, additional lines of melody added on, some of them actually sounding like voices singing, although in no language he knew, until the full complexity of it burst upon him. For some reason the incredible beauty of it left him very sad.

“What did they say that was?” he asked Verid as they were getting up to leave.

“It’s known as the Song of Joy, although it always sounds rather sad to me.”

“Elysians composed it?” He could imagine Alin coming up with something like that.

“It’s from old Torr.” Before Torr fell to the machines. Blackbear shuddered.

“The original instrumentation is a matter of much debate.” Verid’s eyebrows rose at him. “If you think Helicon is bad, in Anaeaon they’ll even hold logathlons over ancient music.”

“Well, personally I wish they’d all stick to music.”

At that Verid laughed very loudly, and a couple of heads turned. “You’ve taken on a ‘volcano’ yourself, I hear. Don’t worry, though, you’ll come through all right. Good luck with your hearing.”

Upon Blackbear’s return, Raincloud crowed with success over Sunflower’s training. Apparently the two-year-old had spent the entire day on and off the potty, with various enticements.

“All right, Sunny,” called Raincloud. “It’s time to perform. Look, Sunny: Doggie’s waiting at the potty. See? Hurry up and show Doggie how to do it.”

“Hurry up and show Doggie,” echoed Hawktalon.

The pet trainsweep, now scribbled all over with animals and stick figures, was stationed right next to the potty. Sure enough, Sunflower tiptoed over and strained to pull his pants down over his chubby legs. Then he sat upon the little seat, smiled broadly, and made a stream of water in the receptacle.

“He did it! Hooray!” shouted Hawktalon, clapping her hands.

“Very good,” said Raincloud. “House, please,” she called, “a teaspoon of fudge ice cream.”

“I show Doggie,” said Sunflower proudly, as Raincloud fetched him the spoonful of ice cream.

Blackbear sank into a chair and contemplated a day without diapers. “I think we might all have fudge sundaes.” Except for Doggie, he thought. The trainsweep jiggled happily, emitting a squeak now and then.

The hearing on the Fertility Project was held at the swallowtail garden outside Science Park. Raincloud had taken Hawktalon to the circus with Iras, and she would have taken Sunflower too, but Blackbear knew he would feel better having the boy with him. Now Sunflower was off playing with Doggie among the bushes full of caterpillars. The tiptoeing boy with his pet trainsweep had drawn nearly as full a crowd as the hearing.

Onyx had agreed to help Blackbear conduct the session; Tulle came too, of course, but declined to take part directly, lest it seem that Kal’s logathlon had obliged her. Draeg and Pirin had come, and Alin sat in the audience up front. Blackbear felt good to see him; Alin would not let him down. He and Alin were regular sparring partners now—with the holostage turned off.

Other citizens trickled in, after their customary five or ten minutes viewing the butterflies. Onyx pointed out several notable logens; then she stopped with an exclamation. “Look—it’s the Guardian Jerya Tenarishon!”

The Guardian was tall for an Elysian, and the butterflies on her talar were unusually striking, their pale blue wings marked with “eyespots.” A golden sash crossed her chest to her shoulder.

“She’s a logen, and now a Guardian,” Onyx added. “If the voters of Tenarion support her, someday she’ll rotate in as Prime.”

“No sign of the Killer yet,” remarked Draeg.

Blackbear smiled, but in fact he was disappointed. Perhaps Kal would arrive later on. He was determined to set that logen straight.

Onyx at last pounded the gavel to open the hearing. She held up a lightbox and read from a prepared text, describing her research on egg genes in considerable detail. It sounded much like one of Tulle’s grant proposals; and, judging by the file size displayed in the lightbox, it would take nearly as long to read.

Blackbear had chosen a different approach. After one last anxious glance at Sunflower, he explained in halting Elysian why he had traveled across the Fold to study ageless embryos. “My people begin to wither and lose their strength at an age when most of you are barely out of the shon. We have children, yes; but they all live with the sadness of watching us die. Why should we have to make this choice? Humans have always longed for children, and for long life, in the same breath.

“Our Clicker families deserve longevity, as surely as you do.” Blackbear carefully said “longevity,” not “immortality,” a word which touched a nerve for some reason. “We are a peaceful people,” he insisted, wishing that Kal were there to hear. “Our children don’t cause wars. We draw our essential needs from the Hills—we grow our own crops, harness our thermal springs. Yet the very earth preys on us; it’s a harsh land, one that no one else wants. Even if we don’t age, life will remain a challenge for us.” Unlike Elysium, where life’s main challenge seemed to be the subversion of Visiting Days.

“You are a peaceful people, too,” he concluded. “Why shouldn’t you as individuals rear children of your own, to carry on your own traits and character? Instead of leaving them all in a—” he tripped over the word “orphanage.”

“Preserve,” completed Onyx. “Like an animal preserve; that’s what the shon is, if you think about it.”

“In any case,” Blackbear continued, “no one would be forced to have children, just because it’s possible. Freedom of choice—isn’t that what your republic is about? Let us scientists do the science; then you, and your elected representatives, may choose to use that knowledge or not.” As he concluded, Blackbear was sweating. He had never given a speech before, much less one about freedom and democracy, but Alin had insisted that he put this last bit in.

There was polite applause.

In the audience, a citizen dressed in yellow butterflies stood up and began speaking rapidly. “Your science sounds most impressive, but as usual you foreigners persist in the most perverse notions about the shon. How else can you rear a child with a modern education, if not in the best professional shon? How do you manage?”

He blinked, and his lips parted. As he struggled to frame a response, a soft squeaking noise out in the garden drew his attention. It was Doggie, jiggling back and forth next to Sunflower. To his horror, he saw the boy methodically stuffing caterpillars into his mouth.

Excusing himself, Blackbear hurriedly got up to rescue the errant child and pull as much chewed caterpillar out of his mouth as possible. A sound scolding followed, under the gaze of a score of curious Elysians getting a first-hand lesson in parenting.

Miserable, he returned to his seat. But Onyx and Draeg were doing a creditable job explaining how they and their siblings had been raised on Valedon, including “modern education.”

Another man asked, “Why are you working only on egg genes for females?” It was the same question Verid had asked, half in jest. But this fellow was dead serious. “If females get to be fertile, and not males, they’ll all think they’re too good for Elysian men. You foreigners want to steal all our females; I know that’s what it is. Why should my tax dollars support that?”

“I’ll handle this one,” said Pirin. “There’s hardly any difference between female and male germ cells worth speaking of. They both start out the same, and most of the egg genes turn out to be sperm genes too. Besides, quibbling over sex differences is for foreigners, not civilized people.”

Blackbear put a hand on Draeg’s arm to restrain him.

At last the Guardian Jerya Tenarishon rose to speak, her sash glittering. “As scientists, your work is beyond reproach...”

Draeg muttered in L’liite, “That’s because you don’t grasp a word of it.”

Frowning, Blackbear motioned him to hush.

“... but my question calls on you as human beings,” Jerya went on. “As humans on this planet, please tell me: What is a human being? In terms of your own work, fixing this gene or that—is a human no more than a machine to be tinkered with? A common servo, say a housekeeper, possesses twice as many neural connections as a human does neurons. Is there any kind of tinkering that you would forbid, on the grounds of humanity, that you would not forbid on a housekeeper?”

At this, Blackbear drew an ignominious blank. All he could think to say was “Humans worship the Goddess in Her temple,” an untranslatable answer that would hardly do here.

But Alin could no longer contain himself. “How could any of us not know, not feel the difference between a human and a machine? The name ‘Helicon’ originally meant, ‘home of the Muse,’” he said. “Humans are musical; humans feel and imagine, envision and re-vision. We can’t put a set value on this quality, any more than fish can put a value on water. No one would dare to tinker with what is human, in a human; in a servo, it’s not there to be tinkered with.”

Jerya smiled. “I hope you’re right, for all our sakes. But you scientists, now, would you never alter a gene, say, to make us more musical?”

Onyx threw up her hands, exasperated. “It’s not in my grant, that’s for sure! Show me the gene, and I’ll tell you if I’d alter it.”

From the audience Tulle arose to explain. “There is no such thing as a gene for musicality, or imagination. Genes can increase the range of hearing of the ear, and assure perfect pitch. Of course, we adjust our gene pool for such talents. But any genetic attempt to stimulate ‘imagination’ may well produce a psychotic. Other worlds have tried this; the Guard of Twelve has never considered supporting such foolishness.”

“Not today,” said Jerya. “We will never know what monsters we wrought in pursuit of long life, back before the records were lost.”

The hearing lasted all day until well into evening, when the lighting dimmed in the street tunnel. The subject wandered; the final hour was taken up by a citizen’s harangue over some border dispute. Sunflower ate enough treats from the servo trays so that he forgot about caterpillars, and he made use of an instant potty-chair which obligingly formed out of nanoplast at the public lavatory.

Tired and exasperated, Blackbear started to hoist the sleepy child up on his back. “I wan’ go home. Ho-ome,” the child wailed.

“Poor dear,” sighed Onyx, putting away her lightbox. She squeezed Sunflower’s leg affectionately between her fingerwebs.

Alin bowed. “Splendid job, Blackbear; you brought it off like a citizen. I’ll catch you next Visiting Day; I’m practicing a new armlock to try out on you.” He approached Tulle, clasping the fold of her train behind her back, the closest to an embrace ever seen in public.

Draeg seemed to have ended with the same high spirits he began; perhaps the breathmicrobes gave him extra stamina. “Hey, we showed those guys a thing or two! That Kal, he was too ashamed even to show up.”

“He should have come,” insisted Blackbear. “He’s got to be set straight. No one really answered his claims.”

Tulle shook her head. “Don’t bother. The more we can distance ourselves from controversy, the better.”

“But people listen to him. He nearly won the logathlon. Next, he’ll go to the Sharers.”

There was an awkward silence.

“Go tell him yourself,” urged Draeg.

“How?”

“Anyhow. You can locate any Elysian anytime, on the holostage.”

“You have to send Raincloud, first,” warned Onyx. “Or else it’s the worst insult.”

The idea, sending his goddess upon such an errand. “Why is it such an insult,” asked Blackbear, “to introduce yourself to someone you have business with?”

Alin turned to him. “It’s our duty as citizens to serve the pleasure of others; but what if one can’t, or won’t, in a given instance? One would lose face all the time; life would be intolerable. By asking indirectly, through a third party, we leave each other a way out.”

“Only servos,” added Tulle, “are called upon without introduction by a mate or a generen. To do otherwise is to tell someone he is no better than a servo.”

Blackbear thought this over, as the others departed. Why not let that Elysian feel like a servo.

With sudden decision, he went to the nearest holostage. “Can you please locate Citizen Kal Anaeashon?”

Kal was at home, his quarters in the upper sector of the first octant; an exclusive district, one unlikely to welcome a trainless foreigner with a crayoned trainsweep and a sleepy child. But Blackbear took the transit reticulum to Kal’s address. Sunflower, now asleep on his father’s back, was no trouble for now.

Out of the transit bubble, Blackbear explored the boulevard until he found the logen’s door. It must be the one, the right number, with the leafwing sign. “House please announce a caller,” he ordered firmly.

The door simply opened. Taken aback, Blackbear paused at the newly molded frame of nanoplast.

A roomful of diffuse lighting met his eyes, and the sounds of music, similar to those he had heard at the concert hall. Mooncurved seating structures in pastel colors seemed to extend from the walls; there were few distinct pieces of furniture. Books lined the far wall, which curved up into the ceiling.

From one of the seats rose Kal. He wore his usual white robe, a plain talar belted at the waist. His gray hair and dark eyes were even more striking up close. “Doctor Windclan,” he said, with a slight bow. “How may I serve you?”

Blackbear blinked twice and took a deep breath. “Why did you say all those lies in public about my work? You dared not even confront me, at my own hearing. What do you know about ‘families’? Have you ever lived in one? Do you call the Hill people poor, just because we herd goats instead of servos? Do you think our community fails to support our own children? Aren’t you ashamed to refer such preposterous claims to the Sharer World Gathering?”

At this point, Sunflower stirred and lifted his head off Blackbear’s shoulder. “We home yet, Daddy?”

“Not yet, dear,” Blackbear muttered, his civil instinct reasserting itself. “This is Sunflower, my younger child,” he said, bringing him down from his back. Sunflower sleepily held out Wolfcub.

Kal bowed again. “Please come in. Excuse me, just a moment.” He disappeared in back, leaving Blackbear puzzled at the door. Upon returning, Kal presented Sunflower with what was unmistakably a stuffed teddy bear. “It was mine, in the shon,” he explained.

Sunflower embraced the teddy bear, took two steps inside, then lay down and curled up with it on the carpet.

Dazed with astonishment, Blackbear found himself entering the house, taking a furtive glance at the teddy bear. The stuffed bear must be ancient, perhaps twice the age of settlement on Bronze Sky.

A servo came out to the room, a bipedal upright like those that carried trays of delicacies in the butterfly gardens. This one carried no tray and wore no apron. Instead, it wore a sort of talar with bright geometric designs. More startling, it had a “face.” The smoothly rounded dome of a “head” had features, cartoonish images of eyes, nose, and mouth that flickered across the surface like a video projected from within.

“This is my ‘mate,’ Cassi Deathsister,” Kal explained. “It is my highest duty to introduce Blackbear and Sunflower Windclan.”

Blackbear nodded stiffly, at a loss for words.

“I’ve heard so much about you,” Cassi said, “and your excellent trainsweep. I thought I heard her call—is she there?”

He blinked quickly. “Yes, of course.” Doggie had waited tentatively at the doorstep, expecting to be left outside as usual at an Elysian home. Cassi walked to the door and let her in. The two of them went off to another room. As Blackbear watched, he wondered how the trainsweep had “called” her, for he had heard nothing.

Blackbear sank into the seat nearest Sunflower, now asleep on the floor. He refused a glass of something Kal offered. “She’s not really your ‘mate,’ is she?”

Kal laughed, and for a moment his face acquired a wonderful look which soon vanished again. “Not in the carnal sense, of course. My mate from Anaeaon died in the ocean, at a Sharer raft we were visiting, some hundred fifty years ago. He had just completed a new Elysian translation of The Web, and he was collecting clickfly records of other Sharer works previously untranslated. The Sharers called him the ‘Scribbler’; they store their own knowledge not in writing but in the chromosomes of clickflies. The clickflies then spin the words into webs for the reading. It’s quite beautiful.”

So Kal’s first mate had been a man, which seemed nearly as odd as having a servo.

“Why do you want to be immortal?”

Blackbear frowned, but after all, one frank question deserved another. “Nobody wants to age,” he said. “Age is a degenerative disease.”

“So you told us, today. But before, you have said you seek immortality. It’s not exactly the same thing.”

So Kal had followed Blackbear’s hearing, after all—and perhaps his practice sessions as well. What eavesdroppers these Elysians were. “Why didn’t you come today to find out,” he demanded, “instead of spying in secret?”

Kal shrugged slightly. “Foreigners taking on Helicon in public; a brave show, but for me to come seemed, well, unsporting.”

“To stay away was cowardly.”

“You’re right. I should have come.”

The admission did not satisfy him. “If you don’t want to live, that’s fine; but why prevent those who do?”

Kal considered this. “Blackbear, do you know the most serious crime an Elysian may commit?”

“Well... murder, I’m sure.”

“No, we’ve sanatoria for that.”

Blackbear was silent. In the music from the room, a new voice entered, a hollow, resonant tone.

“Suicide.” Kal paused, then added, “By suicide, one removes oneself and condemns the rest of us to mourn for the next thousand years. A doctor who once assisted a suicide had to flee to hide with the Sharers. Those of us who long to die are despised far more than those who long to live forever.”

It occurred to Blackbear that the consequences of accident multiply as disease and age recede. Blackbear had lost his youngest brother just twenty years ago, and the thought still made him faint. Kal had mourned his lost mate for a century and a half.

“Are you sure you won’t take some water?” Kal was saying at his elbow.

Blackbear accepted a glass of water. He glanced at Sunflower, sound asleep with the teddy bear, quite still. “Sleeps like the dead,” his grandfather used to say. As a doctor, Blackbear had seen enough dead children to know the difference.

“I know little of ‘families,’” Kal went on, “although yours I’m sure is rich and peaceful. How many children do you have now?”

Blackbear knew well enough why he asked; the size of Clicker families was of great interest to tourists and demographers. “Our Hills can support our growing population, for the next century at least.”

“And what then?”

That seemed far off to plan, but an Elysian would hardly think so. “Bronze Sky still has land to expand.”

“How much, do you know?”

Blackbear tried to envision Bronze Sky’s other continents. Nowhere else were such rich soil and tall mountains to be found. Besides, what if other people filled them up by then? “Someday we’ll terraform another new world. That’s why the Fold founded Bronze Sky.”

“How long does it take to terraform a world?”

“Eighty years it took, for Bronze Sky.”

“Do you know any good candidates?”

He did not. Twenty years to find one, he thought. His forehead went cold for a moment; then he collected himself. This logen must have made a fake trap with figures.

“Families throughout history have never planned ahead,” Kal said, “until the crisis hits. Most families spend most of their time getting out of one crisis and into the next. Look at L’li with its crowded billions. Even on Valedon, a stable democracy, nine-tenths of the people remain at subsistence level.”

This was news to Blackbear, who knew only Valans like Onyx.

“The Elysian Republic is not for families,” Kal added. “The Republic was not founded on ‘freedom of choice,’ but on communal virtue.”

Blackbear glared at him accusingly. “Who uses up the Fold’s resources? Whose demand keeps the price of metals beyond reach? A single Elysian consumes a thousand times what one does on Bronze Sky—and your economy keeps growing. Twelve million citizens, you might as well be a world of twelve billion.”

“Exactly so.” Kal smiled as if delighted. “Try telling that to the Guard, let alone to our citizens. One’s courage fails, I admit. Now, will it help us to have fertile citizens bearing children every four years, on into immortality?”

Hardly. Blackbear felt his head swimming, and realized he was dead tired. Fortunately he could doze in the transit reticulum on his way back, for the servo voice would wake him up at the right stop. There was one more thing he had meant to ask, but its recollection eluded him.

Chapter 11

At a holostage in the Nucleus, Lem Inashon showed Raincloud how to place a secure call to Zheron’s legation. To her surprise, however, the call was refused. Lem retried it, with the proper codes, but got only the same message; the legation was taking no calls at all.

“How can they get away with that?” Raincloud wondered. “Their bill must be astronomical.”

“They’re in the diplomats’ sector,” Lem reminded her. But he too sounded puzzled. “It’s not like them; they love attention. Well, I’ll let Verid know.”

Raincloud felt much relieved for the moment, though disappointed. In the meantime, Verid was unavailable, her office inundated by delegates from Papilion complaining about the fruit fly problem. Their tourist trade was hurting badly, and they demanded some action with the Sharers, who still refused to discuss the matter. Raincloud was curious to know more, recalling her contacts with the fascinating ocean women at their embassy in Founders City. But the matter was outside her department.

She went with Blackbear to a doctor for her prenatal checkups. “You two behave,” she warned the children out in the waiting room, “or Doggie will call us if you don’t.”

Doctor Shrushliu was a resident foreigner of Sharer origin, as one could see from her ocean-born name and her webbed, nailless fingers. But she did have thumbnails, and her scalp had a thin frizzle of hair; perhaps a Valan grandfather, Raincloud guessed.

“First, the surface exam.” The doctor approached her with what looked like a plant with fine tendrils. But the tendrils moved and twined like animal parts. Raincloud drew back. “Relax, please,” said the doctor. “It’s a lifeshaped organism. It will painlessly withdraw a blood sample, to test your chemistry and to sequence the fetal chromosomes.”

“The fetal chromosomes?” Raincloud wondered.

Blackbear explained, “A small number of fetal cells enter your bloodstream.”

Raincloud looked at the tendrils winding around her arm. The Sharers used lifeshaped creatures for all their technology. A thought occurred to her. “The Sharer lifeshapers taught the first Heliconians. Why didn’t they make themselves ageless, long before the Heliconians did?”

“Everyone asks that,” muttered the doctor. “Ask Leresha the Coward, the wordweaver of Kshiri-el.” Doctor Shrushliu next led her to a circular chamber, like a sawed-off spiral stairwell. “You’ll have to empty your pockets,” the doctor warned. “Watches, light pens—anything that deflects the magnetic resonances.”

“It’s an imaging device,” said Blackbear, “based on the magnetic nuclear resonances of organic molecules. Remember, we used one in Founders City to see Sunflower.”

But this one threw up a three-dimensional image of the unborn child that expanded and moved, its eyes round and staring, its limbs twitching now and then. “What,” exclaimed Blackbear, “it’s like the simulator come alive.”

“Your little girl’s swimming just fine,” the doctor told her.

Raincloud smiled. It was good to be “carrying” one again; even at the Nucleus they couldn’t tell her to leave this one home.

“Fetal chromosome sequence is completed,” announced the doctor’s office.

Blackbear looked startled. “Already?”

“Twelve recessive lethals are present,” the voice added, “but none homozygous.”

“No problem. Just keep up the vitamins,” the doctor added, helping Raincloud out of the apparatus and into a seat. She crossed her arms on the desk. “Well, it’s my pleasure to share care with you. Nonetheless, I should warn you that delivering here will cost you ten times what it would outside. I could send you to Kshiri-el, where the lifeshaper will do it for nothing.”

Raincloud considered this. If only she could afford to take her family home to Tumbling Rock for the birth. There, the temple priestesses could prepare her and Blackbear for the time of labor, coaxing the little one out into their loving arms. And Raincloud would be in the proper realm for her dreams to reveal the infant’s name. For her firstborn, she had dreamed of an enormous hawk that swooped down to carry off a mountain goat in its outsized talons. An excellent omen for a firstborn daughter. Her son had inspired a field of golden flowers, taller than the tallest man, their faces broad as dinner plates, full of countless rich black seeds. But here in Helicon, what thing of nature could enter her dream?

She tried again to reach Zheron. Still she could not get through. “All calls rejected,” said the servo voice. Raincloud frowned in surprise. “For how long?” “All calls rejected for the past week. Interference—repairs—contact Sector Oh-three-one...”

Lem shook his head. “Something is wrong. That servo’s barely making sense; it ought to speak in full sentences, for one thing.”

“Let’s go,” decided Raincloud. “Let’s see what’s up.”

“You think so?” asked Lem. “Without permission?”

“It’s a public facility, after all; the ‘cultural artifacts’ were still on view, remember? The worst they can do is refuse to see us.”

So they returned to the diplomats’ sector. The threshold of the legation seemed unnaturally quiet. “Door, open, please,” said Raincloud helpfully. Lem had his train already removed and folded up by his trainsweeps. He stood with his legs spread slightly, his arms deceptively relaxed at his sides.

No trace of a “door” could be seen in the downward sweep of the edifice, and nothing opened. Behind her, Raincloud’s trainsweeps fidgeted uncertainly.

Lem cleared his throat. “Open, Door, by Foreign Affairs Security Order Oh-oh-six-ten.”

For a moment nothing happened. Then at last a crack appeared in the nanoplast, opening with slow reluctance.

The hall was dark and empty. Exhibition panels stood empty and scattered, while odors of spice and decay hung in the air. Raincloud hurriedly unhitched her train for the trainsweeps, then she took a hesitant step inside.

“Great Helix,” exclaimed Lem. “The devils cut us off and jumped ship somehow, all without a trace.”

“Why? Whatever could have happened?” Raincloud wondered.

“Some imperial overlord reversed his orders, I’ll be bound.” Lem shook his head. “They gave us the slip, all right. Flors will be red in the face.”

Lord Zheron, his men at arms, their wives and servants—all gone. Raincloud shook her head in disbelief. She took a step or two within the deserted hall.

A spot of white caught her eye, across the floor. Warily she approached to examine it. It was a mask with a long wooden handle; the mask of a female, like the one worn by the goddess who had stepped out in front of her just before she left the legation. This one, however, was unadorned, perhaps the mask of a servant.

It came to her, then. She must pursue Urulan, not just for Rhun or the sims, but for their goddesses as well. How could she have forgotten? And now, ironically, the chance was lost after all. There was nothing she could do.

Chapter 12

Blackbear was back at the lab reviewing the results of his mutants. He had tried several permutations of the control sequence for Eyeless. One of them predicted germ cells that actually went through meiosis.

He showed Onyx first, before telling Tulle. “I chose this part of the DNA sequence because it binds control proteins during egg production in a normal embryo. I mutated the Elysian sequence to look more like the normal sequence. This one mutant had no ill effects in the simulator, and it induced production of ovogen in tissue culture.”

Onyx scanned the culture readings, the numbers floating above the holostage. Meanwhile Blackbear glanced over at Sunflower, who played with a light pen and a chunk of nanoplast in the corner.

“Wow, that looks good.” Onyx snapped her fingerwebs till they hummed. “Wait till Tulle sees this.”

The lab director was more cautious. “The problem with meiosis has more to do with the DNA modifications,” Tulle said. Longevity treatment modified the DNA so as to prevent chromosome crossover, which causes mutation and cancer in body cells but is needed for meiosis in germ cells. “Besides, our simulation is far from exact,” she warned. “As many as fifty percent of our parameters are untested assumptions: production levels of various embryonic proteins, timing of onset, stringency of control. Of course, we do better all the time; as the literature comes in, we put in the reported figures.”

Onyx said, “It’s remarkable how well the results hold up sometimes. The first heart gene Tulle found fifty years ago looked promising in the simulator. And sure enough, the live embryos turned out.”

Tulle nodded. “It cut the rate of defectives by half. All the shons use it, now. That discovery alone would keep the Guard supporting my research. But since then the data bank for our simulator has grown enormously; it’s a much better predictor now.”

Blackbear nodded thoughtfully. “Still, with so many assumptions, can the results really mean much?”

“Surprisingly yes,” Tulle assured him. “I think that real embryonic development allows more room for chance than our theorists admit.”

“But couldn’t you also miss out on mutations that do badly in the simulator but really would work in live development?”

“It’s possible,” Tulle admitted. “There are two or three cases in the literature. Most of the time, we have no way of knowing—until the simulator gets better.”

Onyx shrugged. “A bird in the hand, as they say. Blackbear, let’s talk to Pirin about starting a simbrid.”

Blackbear followed her down the hall, looking forward to testing a live embryo. Yet somehow he felt like a different person than he had been before the night he confronted Kal. The thought of a planet full of Elysians having ten children each, as Clickers did, was hard to clear from his head.

What am I doing here? he wondered suddenly. Just as quickly he drew himself back. He had learned long ago in Founders City to live amidst contradictions.

They passed the culture room where he heard Hawktalon stacking old culture dishes, then the whine of the waste disposal. “Where do our waste dishes end up?” he asked Onyx. “The cultures, the used reagents, all the stuff we dump?”

“Nothing is dumped in the ocean,” said Onyx. “The Sharer treaty forbids it.”

“So what becomes of it?”

“It all flows into the atom separator. The organic elements are recycled into food, clothing, and so on.”

He made a face. “Who would eat that?”

“You do,” said Onyx. “Unless you go out and fish off a raft, like Draeg does.”

“You mean—when I order a steak, it’s not real?” He felt slightly sick.

Onyx laughed. “You think they slaughter a cow and roast it in five minutes? How do you think the food window works?”

He had avoided thinking too hard.

“Most food comes out essentially the same as the original,” she insisted. “It’s programmed down to the molecular level. Really, would you want to eat a dead carcass, in the modern age?”

Draeg came down the hall toward them. “Hey, Brother, I nearly forgot. How’d you make out with the Killer? Made it home alive, I see.”

Blackbear muttered a guarded response, reluctant to discuss the enigmatic logen.

On his next Visiting Day, Blackbear asked the house to replay on the holostage part of Tulle’s logathlon. While Kal’s claims sounded infuriating as before, at least now he could figure out what the issue was.

Then he remembered what he had forgotten to ask. Kal had said the first Heliconians were taught “not to hope for children, but instead to live for beauty.” Whatever did that mean, Blackbear wondered. Surely the one need not exclude the other?

Without quite knowing why, he found himself asking the holostage to locate Kal again. But the logen’s image appeared in a butterfly garden, surrounded by half a dozen Elysian students with short, gaily colored trains. Blackbear quickly disconnected and put it out of his mind.

That afternoon Raincloud came home earlier than usual. “The Urulites are gone,” she burst out. “They’ve vanished, bag and baggage; no one knows how. Foreign Affairs is having a fit.”

“Too bad,” he murmured, trying to hide his considerable relief. “What did you expect of those barbarians?”

Raincloud did not answer. She absently fingered an object in her hand, a white mask on a stick.

Blackbear gave her a fierce hug. “It’s getting time for braids,” he reminded her.

The next morning, a Visiting Day, he redid the braids for Raincloud and Hawktalon, a biweekly labor of love. First, the old braids, perhaps fifty or so, had to be undone, catching all the little beads as he did so, and combed out thoroughly. Once liberated, the black crinkled hair spread out in all directions. Then the spiral pattern was marked out with comb and pins; for Raincloud, a bold cross-squares pattern that accented her high forehead. At last he could braid the strands, trying to keep the tension even while adding on the beads at consistent levels. He loved the scent of Raincloud’s hair; it was a wonderful opportunity to enjoy her for an hour, stealing a kiss on her neck now and then.

Hawktalon preferred the ram’s horn pattern, in which the braids spiraled out from the center. When hers were halfway done, the house called. “Security unit at entrance, Citizen.”

“I’ll handle it.” Raincloud went to the door, her fresh braids glistening, still moist like a newly emerged butterfly. From the doorway, Blackbear heard muttered voices, one a servo, he thought. Then she returned, frowning. “They want to replace our trainsweep.”

“What? Is one of yours defective?”

“No; Doggie.”

Hawktalon’s head jerked around, and the braid slipped from his grasp. “Doggie? Who wants Doggie?”

“Goddess,” exclaimed Blackbear, “keep still, dear, please.” Doggie was crawling about Sunflower’s room at the moment, while the boy let out squeals and giggles. “Why should the factory replace it now?”

“It’s not the factory, dear,” said Raincloud. “It’s Public Safety.”

At the door stood a squat cubical servo with a hemispherical cap topped by a bright red light that revolved steadily. Behind the large servo stood a smaller bipedal one, carrying a shiny new trainsweep, identical to Doggie without decoration, as far as Blackbear could tell. “I must inform you, citizen,” spoke the square servo flatly, “that your trainsweep represents a possible danger to public safety. We are prepared to replace it now. The City of Helicon regrets any inconvenience, and congratulates you on receiving new merchandise in place of defective goods.”

That word “defective,” again. “The trainsweep serves us well enough,” said Blackbear.

“I told them that,” whispered Raincloud. “But they know something—they got some kind of data from that Valan servo-trainer.”

“The trainer who bought the rights to Doggie’s network? But she was delighted; she found nothing wrong with it.”

The square servo’s blinking light gave Blackbear a headache. “We are very thorough, Citizen. Innocent citizens have been strangled in their beds by faulty equipment.”

“Great Hills,” muttered Raincloud. “You can’t be serious.”

Blackbear agreed, yet he felt uneasy. The Elysian servos must know what they were talking about.

“No!” shrieked Hawktalon. “You can’t take Doggie away, you can’t.” Her half-braided face glared up at him. “Or I’ll—I’ll never eat again!”

Sunflower ran out and clung to his father’s leg. “Doggie,” he wailed.

Above the din, the servo added, “Your replacement will be retrained at City expense.”

Could any servo be trained to act like Doggie?

Raincloud said, “We’re not interested. We appeal the ruling.”

“No appeal. The trainsweep goes today.”

Blackbear gave Raincloud a look of desperation. Sunflower released his leg and hurled himself against the offending servo; Blackbear caught him back just in time.

“I’ll run away from home!” yelled Hawktalon above the din of Sunflower’s sobs.

“Hush, child,” insisted Raincloud. She turned to the Safety servo. “Suppose we ship it offworld for a while?”

The Safety servo considered this. “If the item is sent completely outside Elysian jurisdiction, including satellites, that is your choice. In that case, however, you receive no replacement.”

“Doggie is irreplaceable,” stated Hawktalon.

“We’ll do that,” said Raincloud. “We’ll ship her to Bronze Sky.”

“Very well. You have twenty-four hours.” The two servos departed, hauling off their rejected trainsweep.

“If Doggie goes back to Bronze Sky,” Hawktalon asked more quietly, “can I go back, too?”

Sunflower was still carrying on at the top of his lungs.

“Hush, both of you,” said Raincloud. “To your rooms, now. Daddy and I need to talk.”

With the children settled away, Blackbear started to think. “How much will the freight cost?”

“On short notice? A thousand credits, at least.”

His heart sank. “We were just getting out from under.”

“I know,” she sighed, stroking his arm. “And the children love the thing so. ‘Strangled in bed,’ indeed.” She frowned. “I wonder...”

“Couldn’t we just keep her out of sight for a while?”

“No, servos all have transmitters. The City can track her at all times.”

“Maybe out on a raft? The signal might not carry.”

Raincloud snapped her fingers. “That’s it! The Sharers are ‘completely outside Elysian jurisdiction’; legally, their territory is another world. If they’d take the machine, that is,” she added doubtfully. “You know how Sharers feel about machines.”

“Draeg will take her!” he exclaimed. “Of course—Draeg lives out on a raft. I’m sure he’ll help out; and then, the children can go and see her now and then.”

The holostage located Draeg in the lower west octant, at a bar that catered to foreigners. “Hullo, Brother,” called Draeg, sidling into the column of light. “The logens after you again?”

Blackbear tried as quickly as possible to explain. When he had finished, Draeg was silent for a moment.

“Let me get this straight,” said Draeg. “You want me to fly you this instant out to Kshiri-el, at the height of the seaswallowers, so that you can leave some dumb servo with the Sharers—the most machine-hating folk in the Fold?”

“Not this instant; this afternoon will do.”

“I’ll go,” corrected Raincloud. “I speak Sharer; I’ll explain to them.”

Draeg grinned. “See you then. Hope you’ve got a strong stomach.”

The shuttlecraft looked the same as the one with the chatty servo voice that had landed the Windclans on Helicon some four months before. The window gave a fine panoramic view of the descending afternoon sun shedding its glitter across the waves; it nearly blinded Raincloud’s eyes, accustomed to the dust-filtered blood-red of Bronze Sky.

“You’re a brave one,” Draeg commented from his buckled seat. “None of my sisters would’ve come out in your condition.”

Raincloud said nothing. If Blackbear had gone instead, he would have been honor-bound to bring along their firstborn daughter. Besides, back in earthquake country the home was the most dangerous place to be.

Her morning sickness was subsiding; even so, the heaving of the craft in strong wind gave her stomach a jolt. She nibbled continuously on corncrunch, one kernel at a time to make them last. At her side crouched Doggie, quivering miserably; odd, to imagine a machine feeling miserable. Next to her, Raincloud had brought a recharger, a brick of nanoplast with a solar membrane to keep the poor trainsweep “fed.”

“Going home early, aren’t we?” the voice of the shuttle asked Draeg. “Thought we’d spend another day out on the town, didn’t we?”

Draeg only grunted in response. This shuttle was even chattier than the last one. “All for a bloody servo, too,” he added to Raincloud. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

“You’ve never heard of a servo hurting anyone, have you?” she asked Draeg.

“There are accidents, now and then. The whole city structure is a servo, come to think of it. You can’t escape it—except the way I do.”

The floor began to drop perceptibly beneath her feet. Below, the ocean’s surface was rising up to meet her. Much of it was packed with green-brown raft seedlings, but here and there a great blue clearing appeared, as if the seedling growth had been scooped out. Within the nearest clearing, she could see the waves spiraling into a whirlpool at the center. Her hair stood on end. “Is that...”

“A seaswallower,” Draeg told her. “You’ll never see the beast itself, a great tube of flesh that can suck down the surface for two kilometers across. They migrate north this season, then back south six months from now.”

“Is Kshiri-el raft too big to be swallowed?”

“I hope so. Besides, grown rafts have other defenses—”

The whirlpool spluttered, and out of it erupted a fountain, like a geyser from a vent in the Hills. The geyser of white foam rose so high that it seemed to hang suspended before it flowed down again. Droplets of spray hit the window of the shuttlecraft, which took a sharp turn to distance itself from the eruption.

“Fleshborers!” exclaimed Draeg. “The monster must have swallowed a nest of fleshborers—eels that can strip you to the bone in minutes. Now it’s trying to disgorge them...”

The geyser turned pink. Raincloud tried to watch dispassionately.

“... too late, I’m afraid,” Draeg continued. “Fleshborers nest beneath the outer branches of the raft, affording some protection from seaswallowers. Look. Kshiri-el lies just ahead.”

The center of the raft was a gently sloping hill of green, with a shallow crater-like hollow. Outward in all directions, dark trunks of raftwood extended just below the surface, putting up branches which in flowering season would be thronged with orange blossoms. A raft in full bloom made the centerpiece for many a travel poster.

The shuttlecraft landed firmly on the raft core. A strong odor of salt and seaweed blew in on the wind. Raincloud stepped out onto matted vegetation, ground cover with tiny interlocking branches, a sign of defense against aerial grazers. She looked upward. Long-snouted creatures slowly flapped their wings, circling overhead.

“Fanwings,” said Draeg. “They grow large enough to carry off an infant.”

Fish that had evolved wings. Looking back, Raincloud coaxed the reluctant trainsweep outdoors. Water and salt might not be good for a machine, she realized, but they had no choice.

A couple of children appeared, like violet flowers, their hairless round heads gleaming in the sun. They seemed to know Draeg well, for they ran to him, the littlest one waddling like a duck on her big webbed feet. They reached out to him with their long web-fingered hands, trying to climb onto him. Raincloud watched those hands, recalling how their foremothers had lifeshaped their own children, rather than terraform their planet.

Draeg laughed and went on, leading Raincloud across the raft to the building at the opposite end. It was a silkhouse, a tall multispired dwelling built of saddle-shaped panels of woven green and blue seasilk, fibers of a sea plant that grew off the raft. The silkhouse looked deceptively fragile; in fact, Raincloud knew, its twisted panels made for a sturdy, lightweight construction.

A Sharer adult came toward them from the direction of the sea, beads of moisture still clinging to her violet skin. Like the children, she wore no clothes. Unlike the children, her skin was not smooth. It was crisscrossed all over with a fine net of scars, from feet to fingertips, almost as if a patchwork quilt had pressed itself into her skin.

Raincloud could not help staring a little, for even the Sharer envoys to Bronze Sky had never looked like this. Sharers were known for healing, not scarification, but they liked to keep the scars of natural injury. What injury could have wrought this? She made herself look away, across the raft and sky, her eyes avoiding the piercing rays of sun. Sharers of Shora—here, before the fall of Torr, the forebears of this web-footed woman had defeated a Valan invasion. Their words filled The Web, and they had taught the Heliconians. Even today, they still met the universe on their own terms.

The Sharer carried a bucket of little snaillike shells. She put it down to embrace Draeg. “Share the day, Draeg,” she greeted him in her own tongue. “You’ve come back early.” Through her fingerwebs the yellow sunlight sparkled.

Two youngsters clamored for her attention, excitedly telling her how the great “flyer,” the shuttlecraft, had come to roost.

“Uh, yes, Leresha,” said Draeg. Sharer was a difficult language to learn, and it still gave him trouble. “This, uh, sister needs to share words with you. She is Raincloud Windclan, from the world ‘Bronze Sky.’”

Now it was the Sharer’s turn to stare. Raincloud grew cold, guessing what Leresha must think.

“‘Bronze Sky,’” Leresha spoke at last, like a drawn-out sigh. “The world that died.”

That was the Sharers’ opinion of terraforming. Raincloud wanted desperately to say something; it had happened two hundred years before her birth, after all.... But she knew from experience that silence was best. Around them the sea groaned unceasingly.

“Leresha the Coward,” the Sharer introduced herself at last, giving the selfname she must have chosen at her Gathering upon reaching maturity. Leresha was a wordweaver, Raincloud recalled, the one her doctor had mentioned. “May you swim calm seas,” Leresha said. “What help may we share with you?”

Raincloud spread her hands, remembering the custom. “Thank you, Coward. I have a great favor to share of you.” To ask a favor, and to offer one, were both “to share” one; all Sharer verbs worked both ways, equating subject and object. No wonder their speech made Draeg uncomfortable.

Raincloud pointed to the hapless trainsweep. “This animate device, though non-life, has shared good service with our children. The children call her ‘Doggie’; and see, they have even drawn pictures on her back, without harm.”

Leresha examined the crayoned carapace. “Your children served her well,” she agreed seriously. “They draw excellent figures.” Sharers never missed a chance to compliment one’s children.

“But now the Elysians want her to share parting with us,” Raincloud said. “They claim she is dangerous; that she might even hasten death.” The phrase “hasten death” was the Sharers’ concept of killing: since all death was inevitable, the “killer” could only hasten it. Raincloud added, “I do not understand the Elysians’ fear. They share fear of many things.”

Leresha considered this. Above her bald head a fist-sized insect hovered and settled on her scalp, its limbs splayed out. It generated loud rasping noises by scraping a large claw against a smaller one. A “clickfly,” Raincloud thought, one of the Sharers’ messenger insects. She herself would have called it a “rasp-fly,” for it did not sound at all like the clicking of her own language. After Leresha echoed the clickfly’s vocalization, it departed to alight upon an enormous web it had spun beside the silkhouse. The Sharer word for “web” also means “book.”

Leresha said to Raincloud, “One must remember, the Elysians are young.” Sharers considered everyone young, until they bore their first child.

“Elysians are young,” Raincloud agreed, “but they are our hosts. They have asked us to put Doggie away from Elysian territory.”

“They unspeak her?” Leresha asked. “Unspeaking” was a form of ostracism, the gravest Sharer punishment for intolerable behavior. “They unspeak her for a crime she has yet to commit?”

“That is so. That is why we asked Draeg to share keeping of her out here, on a Sharer raft. We provide her nourishment.” She explained the solar electric cell.

Draeg added nervously, “I know that Sharers share dislike with, uh, nonlife devices.”

“Some do,” said Leresha a little sharply. “Some nonlife devices share dislike with us; they stop moving and lie prostrate without a word to say, until a Valan comes to demand ‘payment.’” “Payment” was a borrowed Valan word, unknown in the Sharer tongue. “Never mind,” Leresha added. “We accept your favor,” she told Raincloud. “My raft Gathering has never refused a fugitive and never will. From a dead world, you bring us a ‘dead’ fugitive; so be it. We will share her keeping.”

“Thank you, sister,” said Raincloud, letting out her breath. “Protection of fugitives” was a sacred obligation for Sharers, which the Elysians respected by treaty. It took her by surprise that the Sharers would so easily accord the trainsweep human status. But this little trainsweep could scarcely harm anyone.

“Thank you,” replied Leresha. “Thank you, Raincloud, for sharing this fugitive to quicken our compassion.”

When Raincloud got home, the children pounced on her to tell them everything. Blackbear, too, was curious; he keenly regretted missing the chance to meet the ocean-dwelling goddesses of whom so much was said.

“The wordweaver thanked me, in the end,” Raincloud concluded. “Can you imagine? For ‘quickening her compassion.’”

Blackbear smiled in amazement. “Compassion...” He remembered the day Alin tried to ask him.

“The Web is all about compassion,” Raincloud explained. “I first took Rhun’s course to read it.” The Web was a dialogue between Sharers and a Valan exile, that took place before the founding of the Republic. Blackbear needed to read it.

“I wish I’d gone to see the raft too,” he sighed.

Having seen the seaswallowers, Raincloud was just as glad he had stayed home. “Two more weeks,” she promised. “Then the monsters will be gone, and we’ll all go out to see Doggie.”

The children cheered. Raincloud wished she felt the same, but a sense of dread would not leave her. What had happened to the Urulite legation? And Doggie—had she really done the right thing? The Sharers must know what they were doing. They had taken far more dangerous fugitives, during the ancient Valan invasion.

That night, alone with her at last, Blackbear watched Raincloud emerge from her clothes and smooth her new braids down over her breasts. He always liked to linger and prolong this time of evening, like the sun of Bronze Sky with its long ruddy twilight. “Raincloud,” he said suddenly. “Would you read to me... from The Web?”

The Web Part I

I was born Lady Cassiter, daughter of the High Commander who led the Valan assault on the Ocean Moon. I followed my stepmother into exile here, and joined the Gathering of Raia-el. Then I named myself Cassi the Deathsister, for my brother back on Valedon now wields my father’s weapons, and I myself had slain bears before he was out of diapers. All that is past, yet the past and future clasp each other like knots of the same web: Tear one strand between two, but countless others still hold. Who knows; Torr may yet destroy us, though no one has heard from Torr in twenty years.

This season, the seaswallowers took a raft from our cluster, and many dear sisters will swim no more. I mourned in whitetrance, inside the silkhouse with Merwen the Impatient and the rest of her family. In whitetrance, the present moment recedes, while one’s past and future appear to the mind as outstretching networks of possibility. A lover may appear, or perhaps a daughter yet unborn, and as always the swallowers and fleshborers lurk in the deep.

It occurred to me just then, how simple it would be to make an end now and leave my troubled past behind; with a single thought, my heart could be stilled, and I would pass forever through the Last Door. But then, just at the point of deciding, I remembered that Merwen sat nearby, and that if instead I turned from the Door and awoke, I might share the look of her eyes once more. So, for the sake of Merwen’s eyes, I awoke.

I lifted my hands, still white although the purple was seeping in as the breathmicrobes in my skin drew oxygen. My throat felt dry as raftwood; the trance must have lasted long. I turned my head, my neck muscles aching with stiffness. There I saw Merwen seated cross-legged on the floor, still completely white, almost translucent. The other sisters must have woken by now.

Another Sharer, awake and gleaming purple, came over to us and offered me a cup of water. It was Merwen’s daughter born of Usha, Weia Who Spits up Her Food. Weia, now a mother herself, had attained her unusual selfname as a three-year-old during the Great Deathhastening, the Valan assault which my father had led. At that time, even the littlest of Sharers had had to take selfnames and share their own protection, instead of waiting till they came of age.

“It’s about time,” Weia told me, whispering because Merwen was still in trance. “Everyone else is dancing and feasting late upon the water, even neglecting their fishing nets by day.” After the seaswallowers have passed comes the season of calm, when tiny luminescent sea creatures dance in the waves, making waterfire. Then the Sharer sisters hold a great festival for Shora the Mother of Ocean.

I swallowed some water. “How long?” my voice croaked.

“Three days you’ve been out. And Mothersister’s still out, trying to outlive her name as usual.” Her “mothersister” meant Merwen, whose lovesharer had carried Weia in the womb.

I tried to reply, but no words came out.

“She’s not as young as she used to be,” Weia added. “She’d better watch her health.”

“We dare not wake her,” I managed to say. The intrusion of an adult might trigger death.

“Of course not, but Oolioo will do. Oolioo? Where’ve you got to?” Weia called out of the silkhouse.

Oolioo sauntered inside, a slippery purple fish of a four-year-old. She was young enough to awaken her grandmother; for the cries of the child and the sick are always heard, even in whitetrance.

“Merwen will be angry, though,” I warned. “She’ll unspeak us for Shora knows how long.”

“Then we’ll offer words, instead of unspeech,” said Weia with a wink. “Just the right words.” Weia was right, for to Merwen, a wordweaver, words are as stone to the stonesick.

So Oolioo came and crossed her legs on the mat before her grandmother, who sat white as a statue of alabaster, lost in that inner country that no sister ever shares. Oolioo said carefully, “Grandmama, I have a question. What is this thing called ‘compassion’?”

At first nothing happened. Only the ocean waves crashed on, endlessly, at the raft’s edge outside the door of the silkhouse, where the rays of the morning sun came to rest. Then something flickered and stirred in Merwen’s body. Her breathing deepened, and the purple bloomed through her chest and her limbs, and up her neck, revealing the long pale scar that snaked up into her scalp. She took a deep breath, and she consented to sip from the cup which Weia hurriedly prompted Oolioo to offer. At last she replied to the child, in a voice that still croaked with dryness. “What is... ‘compassion’? Tell me, Oolioo: Why do you gather whorlshells?”

“Whorlshells?” said Oolioo. “Why, to share the pretty things with my friends, of course, so they will like me better.”

“Excellent.” Merwen’s head turned slightly toward Weia. “They used to send you to me, once, youngest daughter. I see you shared that lesson well.”

Weia’s cheeks darkened, for of course Merwen saw through the trick.

“It’s always a delight,” Merwen added, “to share words with the very young. For they remind us of what we have been, and what part of us lives longest.”

Then Merwen turned to me. My face grew warm, and I fingered the whorlshell hanging from my neck, the sole adornment of my body. “What are you?” she asked. “What have you been, and what shall you become?”

“Whatever becomes me.” I swallowed and added lamely, “I, too, would share learning about compassion.”

Merwen nodded. “Where learning is shared, the amnion breaks, and hope is born.”

“Compassion is worthless,” said Weia mischievously, trying to provoke her mothersister. “That is what many sisters say, alone in their silkhouses, if not in the Gathering.”

A gleam of intensity filled Merwen’s eyes, and I knew then that the Impatient one had returned to us for good. “Do they say so,” she replied. “I wish they’d share this new thought with me. I am well known for my love of all that is new and evil.”

At this, a tear escaped my eye, for there were still those who blamed Merwen for having opened the door of ocean to Valans like myself, and all that followed. “You need water, and food, Merwen,” I reminded her. So she drank and ate, and then we three went out onto the raft to pursue the defense of compassion, the question Oolioo had bequeathed us, while she wandered behind gathering seaweed and fingersnails.

From the water’s edge came Merwen’s granddaughter Adeisha the Shortsighted, an apprentice lifeshaper. Adeisha actually had a Valan father, the first male ever to join a Gathering. The lifeshaper had wisely given her the webbed feet and fingers of her Sharer mother; but her thick black hair and her ingenuous upturned nose were the very image of her father. “Grandmother, and Aunt Weia, share the day,” Adeisha called out. “What do you think of these Heliconians who came to learnshare our lifeshaping?”

The Heliconian doctors had come to us from a distant star, shortly after they discovered the galactic Fold. They sought to learn the Sharer art by which children are conceived between women, the sick share healing, and the creatures of our ocean are bred to wondrous forms.

Adeisha added, “They plan to lifeshape a race whose individuals escape death.”

“They will fail,” Merwen replied as we walked upraft toward the central rim. “But they may fail most beautifully.”

“But our Gathering calls it scandalous! Our sisters won’t accept them, even now after they shared the swallower season with us.”

“The Gathering is right.”

“You surprise me, Grandmother,” said Adeisha. “Surely, in the long run, we need to share friendship with our worthy sisters from the stars. Shora knows, other worlds may send us sisters less worthy, and then we’ll be glad of friends.”

“You are right, too, Adeisha. And you, and the Heliconians, will prevail without my help. Just now, compassion needs my help. Will you join us? We need to show that compassion is not only the most right, but also the most desirable of all virtues.”

“If you can,” added Weia doubtfully.

“I hope you can, Grandmother,” said Adeisha. “When I hear sisters talk, at times I share doubts myself. So I’d like nothing better than to hear you defend compassion.”

“But first,” warned Weia, “you will hear it destroyed utterly. For of all faults a sister may own, surely ‘compassion’ is the worst.”

At her aunt’s remark Adeisha laughed, and even Merwen’s wrinkled eyes smiled. “What a selfname that would make,” said Adeisha, “the Compassionate One! The worst of faults! The Gathering would surely laugh that one down.”

“Perhaps not so soon as you think,” said Merwen. “And yet, you both astonish me; for Weia herself offered her life to save her sisters, at age three, while Adeisha devotes her lifework to the welfare of Sharers great and small. When I see that you both share these doubts, yet practice such goodness despite them, I admire your conduct all the more. I think, Adeisha, it is for you to begin by saying what compassion is.”

Adeisha replied with the earnest, clear-faced look of one whose sixteen years had been largely happy ones. “Compassion is to share oneself for another, without reserve. For example, the mother who gives her life for her child.”

“All at once?” Merwen asked.

“At once, or over a lifetime. Over a lifetime may be harder, in fact, as when one’s daughter suffers stonesickness or some other incurable malady.”

“Like deathhastening,” added Weia. I shuddered to think, for Weia, unlike Adeisha, had been born in time to remember my father’s deathhasteners.

Merwen nodded. “To share a lifetime with a sufferer may take even greater compassion than to die for one.”

Then I asked, “Isn’t the heart of compassion to share feeling with another?”

“Of course,” replied Adeisha, as if that part were the easiest. “But good deeds count more than good intentions.”

“Agreed,” said Merwen. “Now, does a Compassionate One live, or die, only for her own daughters?”

“Of course not,” said Weia. “That would be too simple.”

“She lives, or dies, for other mothers’ children,” Merwen agreed.

Weia, who had walked ahead of us, turned to face her. “A Compassionate One is fool enough to die for anyone, even a flock of deathhasteners. I would have done so, and nearly did.” As a three-year-old, Weia had been held hostage by the deathhasteners; the imprisoned children had refused food, demanding freedom. “So how do you justify such foolishness?” Weia asked. “Isn’t compassion a thing for three-year-olds? Shouldn’t one discard it along with one’s diapers?”

I turned to hide my face, thinking of the other Sharer children and mothers who had died that my father and I might return alive to Valedon.

“Perhaps so,” said Merwen. “But surely, before we discard a thing, we must know what it is, lest instead of diapers we discard a precious bundle of seasilk. What is this thing, this substance, that we call compassion? When water is shared, can we see the water?”

“Yes,” I said, more comfortable with things that are concrete. “We can feel the water, touch it, and taste it.”

“And likewise, when food is shared?”

“Of course.”

“And when a house panel is woven of seasilk, to rebuild our sister’s house after the storm, can we feel that, too?”

“We can hold it in our hands.”

“Is this what compassion consists of, sharing these palpable things?”

I hesitated, unsure now.

Weia said, “If so, then the nonsharer is surely more fortunate than the Compassionate One who shares with others. For if compassion consists of sharing what others need, then who knows one’s own needs better than one’s self? Better to serve oneself, not to share dependence.”

“What you are saying,” said Merwen, “is that the happiest person knows how to share the best things with herself. And how does she learn to do this?”

“Practice,” said Adeisha.

“Practice, starting from infancy,” said Merwen. “The child learns to share care with objects, such as her toys, then more important belongings, then a pet fanwing perhaps, and then with other Sharers. And lastly, she learns to share care with herself.”

Adeisha added, “And with her future selves. By contrast, the nonsharer often seems to act as if her future self is a different person from the present, and therefore fails to serve herself well.”

“Exactly,” said Merwen. “By learning compassion, one learns to care for oneself and future selves. She who shares compassion with a fingersnail, even perhaps with the smallest grain of sand, may be best able to care for herself. Perhaps the Compassionate One is really the most selfish one.”

Weia frowned. “You’re laughing at me.”

“Not in the least, Weia,” said Merwen. “Perhaps we may yet rescue your argument. Does compassion really consist of water, food, and seasilk, these palpable things?”

“No,” exclaimed Adeisha. “No, compassion itself is... is more ‘central’ than all those things.” Her Sharer word “central” carried some of the same sense as the Valan word “higher.”

“What is it then?” Merwen asked.

There was no sound but the lapping of waves upon the distant outspreading branches of the raft. We had climbed to the central rim, a ring-shaped hill, within whose hollow the Gathering would meet. The Gathering was the assembly of all adults of the raft, all those who had named themselves. Each decision—where to steer the raft, how many children to conceive, how much seasilk to trade with other rafts—required the consent of all present, without exception.

The wind was brisk and carried the sweet scent of raftblossoms from the sea. We seated ourselves upon the mossy bank of the rim, as if to join an invisible Gathering.

Merwen said at last, “When we don’t know the answer to something, we guess. We make a good guess, and then we test it out to see what happens.”

Weia eyed her curiously. “Just what do you guess?”

“A good guess would be that compassion includes a kind of spirit, not just palpable things. Suppose compassion relates to spirit as, say, the property of warmth relates to palpable things. Now, we know much about the nature of warmth.”

“Yes,” I said. “Warmth radiates from all palpable things. This is a law of physics.”

“From all physical things? Even human bodies?”

“All of our bodies. Even Valans, who bundle themselves up in ‘clothes,’ can never completely escape the loss of warmth.”

“A childish custom,” muttered Weia, expressing the common Sharer opinion of body clothing. “Only babies need wrapping up.”

“So warmth is a precious thing,” Merwen continued, “which some conserve by ‘clothes.’ How else do we conserve warmth?”

“Blankets,” suggested Weia. “At nighttime, we huddle together within blankets.”

Adeisha added thoughtfully, “When two of us huddle together, we exchange warmth which would otherwise be lost. Together we lose less than when we stand apart.”

“Yes,” I said eagerly, “even animals know this.” I remembered the litter of puppies in my father’s house; they would scrap and bite each other all day, only to curl up in a heap at nightfall.

“Animals eat each other,” Weia pointed out.

“But animals need warmth as much as food,” said Adeisha. “Even the infant needs her mother’s closeness more than her milk. And the infant is central within us all.”

“Then perhaps,” Merwen went on, “the spirit of compassion is, like warmth, something we radiate helplessly, something which one of us alone can only lose, not conserve. Perhaps for that reason, we desire to share compassion, as naturally as we desire our bodies to come together. Compassion is loving everyone and eating no one.”

I looked away. Weia looked down at her webbed toes, silent. I sat so close to Merwen that I could have touched her, but for some reason I dared not.

From across the rim Oolioo shrieked, chasing after a legfish. Weia got up and headed off to fetch her, stroking her back affectionately. The caught legfish lay between the girl’s arms, its eyes staring up foolishly while its tail frantically slapped against her chest.

Adeisha was frowning after Weia, trying to work something out. “‘Loving everyone’? I think Aunt Weia gave up too easily. If compassion means the total sharing of self, then isn’t the death-seeker the happiest? Isn’t she who feeds herself to a starworm the most fortunate creature in the ocean? Were all of us so ‘fortunate,’ would we not perish in one generation?”

“You are right,” said Merwen. “If one gives oneself up totally, one has nothing left to give. This sounds like a poor sort of compassion.”

“And yet,” said Adeisha, “at the right moment, it may be the most central act of caring possible. How do we resolve this paradox?”

“The answer can’t be found in any one person. Compassion exists within the Web. The Web connects all living things in relations of sharing: when one strand pulls, the next holds. The Web balances all our needs and commitments, to share with others and with ourselves. Each small link strengthens the Web as a whole; just so, an act of compassion anywhere breeds caring everywhere.”

This “Web” was a difficult concept, as alien to my Valan background as the webbing between Sharer fingers and toes. The image Sharers have in mind is that of the web spun by a clickfly, who can be taught to write messages in the intricate pattern. The Web of Shora encompasses all living organisms and their needs for each other, including the community of Sharers. Sharer children are taught that their central aim in life is to strengthen the Web.

Merwen turned away and half rose from her seat, as if to depart. But I could not contain myself. “Merwen—what compassion is there in this ‘Web’? Creatures eat and are eaten. In the end, Shora Herself devours us all.”

Merwen turned, and her gaze burned into mine. “Just so. Why else did you and I sit in whitetrance for three days?”

“Well then,” said Adeisha, “it’s plain that to know compassion better, and to answer my aunt’s argument, we first need to know the Web better. Don’t you agree, Aunt Weia?” she added, as Weia returned, having sent Oolioo off for a swim.

“The Web is a tale for children,” Weia rejoined, mischievous again.

“On the contrary,” warned Merwen, “the Web is a tale only for those who can dive deepest, to the very floor of ocean, without going mad. Take care, dear sisters; I share fear with you.”

“We’re in good hands with you,” Adeisha insisted. “Come, let’s weave in our minds a vision of the true Web, the Web as it could be if all of us understood it better. Then within this Web at last we will see compassion at work.”

Section 2: The Child

Chapter 1

At the Nucleus, Flors was briefing the Prime Guardian on the day’s crises. Verid tried to relax beneath the arpeggio of butterflies, but she could not.

The L’liites had just defaulted on their oldest loan at Bank Helicon, with fifty years left of a hundred-year term. The debt crisis sent shock waves through the economies of several worlds, including Valedon, where factories canceled orders and sent home thousands of workers. Iras was working overtime to renegotiate, but that was only a first step. Everyone expected the Guard to do something; but what? Could Verid tell L’li how to run their planet of twenty billion people? How much of their borrowed cash had been siphoned off into private accounts, back to Elysian bankers who turned a blind eye?

Meanwhile, the Guardian Papilishon continued to press for action on the fruit flies. And, of course, Zheron’s precipitous departure had dashed her hopes of progress with Urulan, while Subguardian Flors was here crowing about it. Hyen listened calmly, with no sign of worry about the growing scandal over his not-so-private life.

Verid took a deep breath and willed herself to relax. She imagined herself a Sharer entering whitetrance to recall her past and envision her future.

She had defended the Sharers once, as a logen. She had argued their right to harbor an Elysian fugitive, a citizen who had broken Elysium’s highest law. A doctor, he had assisted a man to die: a man of nine centuries, old even by Elysian standards, with a rare form of brain degeneration. Was it murder, or compassion? She still debated herself.

Flors at last wound up his postmortem on the Urulites. “As you see, Guardian,” he told Hyen, “the so-called Cultural Legation has solved our problem for us by withdrawing from the planet. No longer will we be troubled by the questionable representatives of that inhuman regime.”

Verid sighed. Flors was worse than unmusical; he was tone-deaf. A precious opportunity had been lost. Why had Zheron taken off, and why without warning? she had asked herself a hundred times. Of course, had he let her know, then Foreign Affairs would have had to know, and documents and explanations would have detained him. But why the haste?

Perhaps the Imperator had died. His succession would be uncertain, for the First Queen had no sons. That would draw Zheron home.

“Questionable, indeed,” murmured Hyen. “A pity their departure could not have been... foreseen.”

“No harm was done,” Flors went on quickly, anxious to escape embarrassment over the failure of his electronic spies. “We’d scarcely have bothered to stop them, anyway. They took passage in a ship of L’liite registry, actually owned by a Bronze Skyan rice merchant.” Flors eyed his Sub-Subguardian coldly. “The involvement of your Bronze Skyan translator now appears doubly embarrassing. I forbid any further interference of that foreigner in Urulite affairs.”

Hyen waved his fingers. “I’m sure Verid knows how to assign her support staff. I suppose you’ve got a statement ready?”

Flors read a statement for the press, his usual catalog of condemnation, essentially saying good riddance.

“Let’s add,” said Verid, “that of course in the future, we’ll always reconsider any reasonable attempt to reopen dialogue.”

“No,” insisted Flors. “There was no official dialogue in the first place. The Urulites themselves would only ridicule our softness. Haven’t you learned that by now?”

Hyen said quietly, “Flors is right this time. They abused our trust.”

Verid acquiesced in silence. Flors then took up the L’liite debt crisis. Everyone wanted action of one sort or another: freeze L’liite assets in Elysium, or reschedule the loans and add development aid; bail out the stricken banks, or let them fail, serve them right for cheating on their Visiting Days. Whatever was done in the end would outrage half the planet.

Her eye caught sight of a caterpillar, spinning its chrysalis. The shiny chrysalis reminded her of Iras, her golden-haired lover. She had warned Iras, decades before, not to trust the new regime in L’li, even in the name of compassion. Small loans to farmers with babies on their backs were a good risk; big loans to young planetary regimes were not. But Iras was more daring, and what did Verid love her for, if not for that.

“It’s still too early for us to step in,” Hyen concluded, as Verid figured he would. “Let the banks do what they can.”

Flors nodded and left for a conference with Guardians Tenarishon, Inashon, and Catashon.

“Well,” Hyen told Verid, “I’d still like to see the Azure Throne one day.”

Verid took a deep breath. She wished Hyen had chosen a Subguardian he respected better, instead of one whom he undermined behind his back. But Hyen, who had a keen eye for talent, distrusted it too near his own power. “Where do you think Bronze Sky will settle its own overflowing billions, a hundred years from now, if not Urulan’s open spaces?” she asked. “The Sharers won’t let us terraform another world, and if we don’t, who will? No one, until there’s a crisis and billions starve. The Fold can’t afford to sit by and watch Urulan poison its own planet with thermonuclear weapons.”

“No,” said Hyen. “But if Urulan is as desperate as you say, then they’ll find their way back here soon enough.”

“How can they, with all our doors shut?”

Hyen shrugged. “The shonlings might hold another craft fair.”

Later, in her walnut-paneled office at the Nucleus, Verid apologized to Raincloud for Lord Zheron’s untimely defection. “Don’t think your efforts were wasted, though,” Verid told her. “The Urulites will have to come back some day, In the meantime, the experience we’ve gained will serve us well.”

Raincloud said nothing, The Urulite missile threat remained, although it had dropped out of the news. As for herself, in her present condition she would do well to avoid duels to the death. She wondered what Zheron would think if he knew she had conceived. An Urulite newborn was not though to exist as a person until its father held it under water and brought it out—if he chose to do so. And yet, she regretted her lost adventure. She took a breath. “What’s next?”

“Imperial broadcasts have dried up, too,” Verid observed. “There’s a fair bit of work in the archives. Beyond that, we’re shorthanded in the L’liite area just now. How’d you like to assist the entourage of the L’liite trade minister?”

Raincloud raised an eyebrow. Elysian “Foreign Affairs,” she realized, was a small operation compared to the Bronze Skyan State Department. In some ways, Elysium felt like a small town; all their citizens put together added up to but a tenth the population of Founders City. “I understand the current situation with L’li is... complex,” said Raincloud. “What will happen to Iras’s new loan?”

Verid’s face went blank. “We can’t make exceptions. It’s up to Bank Helicon to reschedule, if they choose.”

“Well, at least a world doesn’t go bankrupt.”

“No,” said Verid. “Though perhaps some should. What do you think should be done?”

She had no answer, except that nobody ought to incur debts outside her clan. “How did the bank ever get into this mess?”

“Big investment brings big returns. Elysians habitually underestimate the volatility of foreign investment.”

Greed, in other words. “You blame too much of your troubles on foreigners. A thousand years ought to teach you better.”

“Exactly,” Verid agreed enthusiastically. “That is what I keep telling Iras. If the poorer worlds want help to remodel their climates and build solar power satellites, why not pay a contractor to do it, instead of a cash handout?”

“That’s patronizing,” said Raincloud. “I don’t mean to absolve the L’liites, though. No one should take on obligations they can’t meet.”

Verid thought this over and laced her fingers. “I suppose the L’liites see it as rich against poor. Why in the universe do we have so much, and they so little? Why should they repay anything?”

This last was too much for Raincloud. “You all think only of money, L’liites and Elysians both,” she burst out. “There are things worth more than money. Love and honor.”

“And music and butterflies,” added Verid. “And of course,” she added thoughtfully, “one’s reputation.”

Reputation was a matter of concern in the Nucleus these days—in particular, the reputation of the Prime Guardian. Hyen’s sex life was a major scandal, even on the respected Anaeaon channel. Raincloud could not figure out why; he sounded no more disreputable than the average Elysian.

She met the L’liites that afternoon at a reception at their embassy. The trade delegates were nothing like what she expected. Instead of their native dress, which resembled the wide-bottomed trousers that Clickers wore, these L’liites wore talars of gleaming seasilk hung with enough ropes of gems to shame even a Valan gold merchant. Their banquet tables displayed whole roast lambs and suckling pigs, and overflowed with the rarest of fruits and delicacies unknown to her. They hardly looked like paupers showing up for a handout.

The delegates spoke fluent Valan most of the time, and Elysian when appropriate, descending to L’liite only for the purpose of confidential disclosures. One attaché drew Raincloud aside. “Surely you understand us, Sister,” he murmured discreetly. “Your own people chose to leave our world for the same reasons that many still seek to leave today. Our world is too small—what can we do?”

“It’s regrettable,” Raincloud replied cautiously.

“When will our Fold partners see reason? When will another planet be terraformed?”

She took a breath. “Shora is not the place for such discussion.”

The man touched her arm and drew closer. “Tell your ‘guardians’ this: If no new worlds are available, desperate millions will seek out the old ones.” He drew away, leaving Raincloud speechless at this threat.

The next day, despite the bank crisis, Iras met Raincloud at the circus as planned. Her curls radiated like the Bronze Skyan sun at dawn; what stunning braids they would make. “You should be flattered,” Iras told her. “Nowadays, I keep so few Visiting Days, I hardly see anyone.” As she spoke, a servo came down the aisle, not one of the food vendors, but a security octopod. Iras hastily slipped her holocube into a deep pocket of her train.

“A reminder, Citizen,” called the octopod, flexing its tentacles emphatically. “Three more days to catch up on visitation before your accounts close.”

“Yes, I know,” Iras muttered, looking off toward the parade of elephants entering the ring.

“Goddess,” exclaimed Raincloud. “What will they do to you?”

“They’ll freeze all my accounts; even my house won’t obey me anymore. Then I’ll be off to the Palace of Rest.” Iras spoke from experience, Raincloud suspected. As the octopod moved off, a bell tone emanated from the pocket in Iras’s folded up train. She pulled out the holocube and listened to the gesticulating figure within its depths. “I told you, I can’t touch anything to do with terraforming,” Iras replied to the cube. “White holes for geomorphic development, yes; even interstellar missiles, we can channel the funds. But not terraforming.”

“Valan missiles?” Raincloud could not help asking, as Iras put away the cube. “How do the Sharers let you get away with that?”

“Did I say a word about missiles? You didn’t hear it, did you?” Iras responded carelessly. “It’s channeled through intermediaries on several planets. If the Sharers know, they look the other way. After all, Urulan threatens them, too.”

That did not sound at all like Sharer logic, Raincloud thought.

“You’re so understanding about my interruptions,” Iras added apologetically. “Foreigners know the meaning of hard work.”

This annoyed her. “Work isn’t everything. Only a mole grubs for food all day. People need to take time up in the highest Hills, to commune with the Dark One.”

Before Iras could reply, an elephant appeared in the audience behind her, raising its trunk with a shriek; a real live elephant, smell and all. Raincloud gaped in astonishment, as the elephant parade turned into a magic act. There were swirling lights, and men with their heads cut off, and a goddess who levitated. It was a good show, as good as the foreign acrobats, yet somehow, after four months in Helicon, Raincloud had grown rather used to “magic.”

“What do you think of our Prime’s latest scandal?” Iras asked. “Hyen may actually lose the next election.”

Raincloud shook her head in puzzlement. “I thought Elysians scarcely cared what their menfolk were up to.”

“It’s not what he does that counts. He’s done that for years. He collects his lovers, sometimes twenty in one night. He likes different positions, sometimes one partner below and one on top, both at once. It’s quite the thing, I’m told, in the night spots of the Seventh Octant.”

“I thought you said Elysians were not acrobats.”

Iras laughed. “Not in public—that’s the point. Hyen is into gaming, too; whoever lost had to do it in public. Hyen lost.”

Raincloud frowned in puzzlement. “In public?”

“On a holostage.”

“Oh, I see.” She shook her head in disgust.

“You must have seen it; it’s been all over the news.”

“No, I haven’t. I’ve heard only cryptic references.”

“Your house,” Iras said. “You’re registered as a shon, aren’t you?”

“Yes, of course.” Hence Hawktalon’s complaint at her lost privileges.

“Then all your reception is screened and censored.”

“Thank goodness,” Raincloud said with a shudder. But then she wondered, what else might be censored?

“Elysians are claustrophobic; we all have to deal with each other for a thousand years. A reputation lost is irretrievable. Unless you get ‘rehabilitated.’” Iras’s face, lined with strain, belied her light words.

Raincloud said, “All those Visiting Days—you must be fined to death, on top of everything.” And the “Palace of Rest”; what was that like? An Elysian prison?

“The L’liites have cost us more than all the fines,” said Iras. “I’m waiting to hear from them right now on a rescheduling plan. As for my division, we’ll take pay cuts. I expect I’ll have to sell one of my homes in Letheon.” Iras accepted a drink and a flower cake from a black-clothed waiter servo. The show was at intermission, and the noise had abated. The departed elephant had deposited something real on the floor; floor cleaners were collecting the mess to scuttle off with it, to cycle into a fresh batch of flower cakes somewhere.

Raincloud thought of the L’liite reception the day before, and the trade delegate’s threat, which of course she could not disclose. “Why is L’li in such bad shape?” Raincloud wondered. “All those trillions invested over the last century, and still their people starve.”

“Their regime is vastly corrupt.”

“If you know that, then why hand them cash?”

Iras shrugged. Then her face changed; she shivered suddenly and crossed her arms, pulling at her talar. “It’s cold in here,” she said abruptly. “Let’s go out.”

Raincloud followed, perplexed, for she felt no cold. Outside, in the street-tunnel, the crablike cleaners probed every crack of the passage, whose surface inclined lazily up into the facades of music halls and butterfly pavilions. The scent of passionflowers drifted over. Raincloud unfolded her own train as the trainsweeps followed Iras into the stream of Elysians, their trains extending and swaying like giant ribbons. Iras shivered again and she walked briskly, her train stretching at the trainsweeps which hurried to catch up with her.

“It’s a chance we took,” Iras said at last. Raincloud walked beside her, hoping the trains would not tangle. “At the time, L’li had a progressive young leader who promised drastic reforms. But she died, of course. You foreigners have an annoying habit of dying off and leaving affairs in the worst hands. Nothing personal.”

That was true, Raincloud thought. She often despaired of the city folk elected to govern Bronze Sky; the good ones seemed to fall the quickest. “But just a few weeks ago, you were concluding yet another deal with L’li.”

Iras turned off the street-tunnel into a garden of heliconians, orange and black ones, flitting about the tangle of passionflowers. She stopped to meditate. Raincloud liked best to watch the bristly caterpillars, devouring the leaves as a newborn devoured milk.

“We know we’ll never see those loans paid,” Iras said abruptly. “We pity those people.”

Raincloud’s eyes widened. She watched Iras curiously.

“It horrifies us, to—” Iras broke off, breathing quickly. “To be what we are, in a universe of others whose lives are brutish and short. The L’liites especially, whose children die of the most gruesome diseases. How could we not pity them?”

She absorbed this with uneasy sympathy. Verid had blamed the crisis on greed. But compassion mixed with self-deceit was little better.

At dinner, Sunflower took apart his grilled cheese. Picking out the cheese, he arranged the two pieces of bread next to each other so their corners touched.

“Eat, Sunny, please,” Blackbear insisted.

Raincloud frowned at the child, though the sight of her youngest always melted her heart. “Sunny, your food is not a toy.”

“It’s not real food, either,” said Hawktalon.

She eyed her daughter intently.

“She’s been like that all day,” Blackbear muttered. “She walked up to the servos and told them they weren’t real people. She even told the embryo simulator.”

Such impertinence could only be dealt with after dinner. Raincloud looked at Sunflower again.

“It’s a bu’fly,” Sunflower explained, fingering the bread slices.

“Well, eat your butterfly, please.”

“She’ll cry.”

Hawktalon laughed. “She’ll cry! The butterfly’ll cry if he eats her, Mum!”

“You’re excused from dinner,” Raincloud told her daughter. “Please undo your hair for your father to rebraid tonight.”

Hawktalon shook her frizzled braids about her face. “I won’t have them done. Nobody else has to have braids.”

Silence fell. Blackbear stared in amazement.

“You’re a firstborn Clicker goddess,” Raincloud stated flatly. “You’d be a laughingstock without braids.”

“No other shonlings wear them,” Hawktalon said. “Why can’t I go live in the shon?”

“You’re not a shonling.”

“Sure I am. This is a shon.”

“Then you’re already in one.” Her firstborn was getting to match her at linguistics, Raincloud thought.

“I mean a real shon. Like the one Lorl keeps telling me about.”

Blackbear put in, “I told you to stay away from Lorl.”

“Only orphans live away from their families,” Raincloud told her.

“But the shon is a family, too. The shon has professional parents—they’ve been parents for hundreds of years, and they really know all about it.”

Silence again. Blackbear gave Raincloud a look as painful as she felt. Was this the child she had nursed for three years and carried on her back for six?

“The shon isn’t what you think,” Raincloud warned. “It’s not toys and ice cream all day.”

“Of course not, Mother. It’s like school all day. They learn to build spaceships and computers, and write music dramas, and practice citizenship. They study foreign languages and have multicultural experiences.”

Sunflower was rubbing his eyes, and his face wrinkled. “Doggie,” he moaned unsteadily, as if he had just remembered. “I want Dog-gie!”

Blackbear sighed. “He’s going to cry over the trainsweep. He still does this two or three times a day.”

Hawktalon said, “I miss Doggie, too.”

“How would you like to go visit Doggie, next Visiting Day?” Raincloud offered.

The seven-year-old jumped up from her seat, her hands shoving the table forward. “Visit Doggie! Hurray!”

“Doggie, Doggie, Doggie!” said Sunflower.

“Very well, we’ll visit Doggie—if you get your braids done and behave like a goddess from now on.”

That night, Raincloud lay on her back in bed, while Blackbear gently stroked the taut skin of her belly. The light was dim and golden; they had experimented with the house to get it just right.

“Do you feel it yet?” he asked.

She paused, trying to feel, then shook her head. “It’s not yet quickened.” The quickening in the fifth month, when one actually felt the little one moving inside for the first time, was the point when one announced one’s condition to the High Priestess and the clan. Before quickening, the fetus had no existence, and the woman who carried it might put an end to it at will. After it quickened, one was honor-bound to inform the High Priestess.

For Raincloud it made no difference, as she wanted her third child badly, even hungrily; she longed to breathe the scent of its soft hair, as its head rested beneath her chin. She could hardly wait to write the High Priestess, and her mother and father, and Nightstorm.

Blackbear stroked her belly. His mushroom rose and expanded gently. Then he looked up, suddenly alert. “I forgot something. A letter came for you.”

“A letter? From Bronze Sky?”

“It’s got the seal of the Goddess.”

The High Priestess. Why would the High Priestess write her? Such news could only be very good—or very bad. She felt cold and shivered involuntarily.

Blackbear had already risen to fetch the letter. Sure enough, the parchment was sealed with the waxen imprint of the Dark One, her upper arms rising to the dance, her middle arms clenching the snake, her lower arms cradling the child. The Snake’s Day was past; the Day of the Child came next, a few months off. She would miss the Day of the Child in Tumbling Rock this year, she thought with a pang. She pried off the seal.

From the High Priestess of the Seventh Hill of the Dark Goddess, to Raincloud, daughter of Windrising, granddaughter of Wolf in the Wind. Raincloud’s grandmother Wolf in the Wind had given the Windclan its name; it numbered seven daughters and twenty-one granddaughters. The octogenarian Wolf in the Wind still convened the clan council, but her daughters took care of daily affairs. Upon the Clanmother’s death, the daughters would move out to found their own clans.

Whereas the Dark One in her wisdom has made our clan daughter Falcon Soaring unable to conceive of her own... She frowned, remembering. Her cousin Falcon Soaring had lost her ovaries after infection from a botched cyst removal. Not all the mountain doctors were as competent as Blackbear.

The Dark Goddess since time before memory has called all our daughters the daughters of one mother. So, as our daughter seeks a child, let one of our sisters embrace this honor.

The parchment shook in her hand. Honor—a gift of life.

“What is it?” Blackbear insisted.

“They’ve given up on Falcon Soaring,” she told him quietly. “She’s been declared infertile, and they’re calling for someone to donate a child.” That was the custom, when a goddess could not bear one of her own. Usually another clan daughter, a sister or cousin, provided.

“But—but why didn’t they send her to the clinic at Founders?” Blackbear exclaimed. “I told her, at Founders they can fix that.”

“Really?”

“Sure. They generate pseudoovarian tissue in culture, using her own undifferentiated stem cells. Then the egg’s fertilized in vitro, and there you go.”

“I see.” She thought a moment. “If it’s that easy, how come the Elysians don’t do it?”

He paused. “That’s a good question. I think their longevity treatment scrambles the methylation of their chromosomes.” Both egg and sperm DNA have special methylation patterns which the embryo needs. “Anyway, that’s no problem for Falcon Soaring.”

Confused feelings filled her. If she were home, Raincloud would surely have offered her own child. She wished she could, and yet felt overwhelming relief that she could not, and shame at her own relief. “We must do something,” she said at last. “They have to send her to the clinic.”

“Of course,” agreed Blackbear. “That’s what she wants, a child of her own. I’ll line her up with the best specialist at Founders.”

Raincloud thought it over. She could do better than offer her own child—she could help her cousin have one of her own. “The thing is, how to bring it up? You know how touchy Clanmother gets after she’s made a decision.” She nodded. “When mine quickens, I’ll call Mother to announce it. Then I’ll talk to her about Falcon Soaring.”

Chapter 2

The polished obsidian Goddess faced them as they knelt for their morning devotions. Blackbear eyed the snake transfixed forever between Her jaws, and the child suckling in her lower arms. Your child is My child, She seemed to say.

Raincloud’s features glowed with the flush of pregnancy, as she began the morning prayer. “Blessed are Your great arms that made the serpent, Your full breasts that feed all children of creation, and Your burning fingers that lift up our spirit in the dance of joy.”

Hawktalon’s new braids gleamed, but she slouched forward and pouted. Usually she was so eager to be grown-up, but today Blackbear had to nudge her. She straightened her back and told the Goddess, “You’re not a real person, either.”

Raincloud yanked the child to her feet; Hawktalon gave a sharp cry. “For shame,” exclaimed Raincloud. “You’ll spend the whole day in your room.”

“Then I’ll never come out,” Hawktalon called as she was hauled off, attempting the “Tumbling Rock” without success. “I’ll tell the nanoplast never to make a door again!”

Blackbear cradled Sunflower on his lap. “Shall I stay home with her?” he asked as Raincloud returned.

“Perhaps,” she said doubtfully. “She might like that too well. Let her miss rei-gi practice, then take her to the lab as usual. That ought to be punishment enough.”

In the transit vesicle Hawktalon was withdrawn, unresponsive to her father’s friendly remarks. But she behaved herself otherwise. Sunflower avidly watched the news on the holostage. A derelict L’liite starship had just made an emergency landing on Valedon. It held nearly a thousand illegal immigrants, half of them children with staring eyes and skeletal faces. To ship them back to L’li would be expensive, perhaps impossible politically.

As the vesicle fused and their seats dissolved away, Blackbear tightened his grip on Sunflower’s plump little hand. How fortunate he was that his ancestors went to Bronze Sky.

His grip was not tight enough to keep the toe-walking child from falling twice in the street, scraping his knee, then his elbow. But today Sunflower refused to be carried, having taken it into his head to imitate big sister. Thank goodness the “pavement” was so antiseptic, thought Blackbear. With relief he ascended the ramp to Science Park.

The lobby display of Caenorhabditis writhed overhead as always, its transparent body tracing elegant curves. He paused, recalling Raincloud’s question about cultured ovaries. He ought to have answered better, he thought; he should know precisely why the aging treatment prevented adult cells from dedifferentiation into pseudo-germ cells. He had to finish reading those references.

At the Fertility Lab Blackbear’s Eyeless gene had been transferred into simbrid embryos under Pirin’s direction. With luck, Tulle predicted, they would develop normally and make ovaries with something close to normal egg cells. The simian hybrids developed at the pace of human embryos, so it would take weeks or months to see the results. In the meantime, Onyx taught him to mutate Eyeless to several variants which ultimately might develop even better.

Since the L’liite ship landed on Valedon, the mood in the lab was tense. Draeg now refused to speak to the Elysian students, whose disdainful looks betrayed a prejudice that disturbed Blackbear. Only Onyx and Blackbear managed to keep on good terms with everyone.

During the simulator’s frequent downtimes, Draeg held forth at length about the crisis. “Do you know what it’s like to grow up in a cubic mile of metal without tap water?” he told Blackbear, who was trying to transfer tissue cultures while keeping an eye on Sunflower. “You drink from the sewer. My mother’s first three babies died of the runs. My two younger sisters were sold to a brothel to buy a dowry for the eldest. My brother and sister both have a permanent stoop from working the looms since age three—that same damned textile firm whose trade rep took Raincloud to dinner.”

Blackbear swallowed and nodded. The nanoplastic tissue culture vessels, with their billion miniature intelligent circuits, came in and out of focus before his eyes.

“What do you think will happen if our world accepts the austerity package Bank Helicon wants? Just what do you expect?” Draeg shouted in Blackbear’s ear.

Screams emanated from the next room. “No, no,” wailed Sunflower.

“Hawktalon, leave him alone,” Blackbear called out. “Finish those inoculations.”

“It’s not me, Daddy,” her voice insisted. “The nanoplast is swallowing him.”

Blackbear jumped up from his seat; a culture vessel fell and clattered on the floor. He raced out in time to see Sunflower engulfed in an amorphous shell of nanoplast, slowly folding up around him. Sunflower shrieked as his arm got stuck in the rising stuff.

“No, don’t!” Onyx turned from her embryo scans and caught Blackbear’s arm. He twisted her off and reached for the child. He pulled at the nanoplast, but it molded to his fingers and caught him fast. He wrenched his hand out; the stuff pulled apart, and some blobs of nanoplast fell to the floor, oozing across. His hand reddened as the pressure of the stuff constricted his fingers.

Onyx pointed a small oblong control unit at the nanoplast engulfing Sunflower. A red homing beam hit the stuff; it stiffened and stopped moving. “Now you can pry it off,” Onyx shouted above Sunflower’s howls. She aimed the control unit at Blackbear’s hand, then at the other blobs wandering across the floor.

The nanoplast splintered with a sickening crunch as Blackbear pried it from his hand and pulled the shell apart from around Sunflower. Most of the other lab members had wandered in by now, intrigued by the sight of a child in a fullblown fit of screaming. Tulle’s capuchin scampered off to inspect a crawling blob of nanoplast that Onyx had missed.

“I was just experimenting,” explained Hawktalon. “I pushed two culture vessels together real hard, and they stuck. They oozed together like soap bubbles. So then I stuck on another one, just one or maybe two. I told him not to sit on it.”

Back at the house Blackbear awoke from a nap, all too brief, when Raincloud got home from the Nucleus. His lingering sense of dread meant he must have dreamed of his lost brother again. He pulled himself up on the bed, tired and depressed. “Make us a creamed goat stew please,” he mumbled to the house. “With one dish of golden fritillaries.” The last was an Elysian concoction his goddess had grown partial to, a vague mixture of fruit and fish flavors that came shaped in orange butterfly wings.

Raincloud kissed him on the forehead. He watched her rounded belly, thinking of the thumb-sized creature with its moon-like eyes that dwelt inside.

“And how’s my big girl, and my little sweetie?” she asked, picking up Sunflower to kiss him on the head.

“Hawk is in her room, adding fractions and reading colonial history.” At least the girl had been, under strict orders, the last he had looked. “Your ‘little sweetie’ nearly didn’t make it home.” He recounted Sunflower’s mishap with big sister.

Raincloud listened gravely. “This is no place for a firstborn goddess. If we were home, I could send her ‘cross clan for a week; her aunt Ashcloud would put the fear of the Dark One into her.”

“Better yet, to the temple. Let her learn to kiss the snake.”

“Hawktalon would make a good High Priestess,” said Raincloud thoughtfully. “It takes a knack for people, as well as a nerve for snakes. Another year or two, and she can apprentice—if she dares. Well, for now there’s one more option.”

“What do you mean?”

“She said she wants to go to the shon.”

“What? You can’t be serious.”

“I’ve looked into it,” said Raincloud. “The generen says Hawk wouldn’t have to live there full time; she could go as a day student, as often as we like.”

Blackbear slumped back on the bed; too tired to think anymore. A book slipped on the shelf; by now the bedroom walls overflowed with books that Raincloud had printed out to stock her own library. From the kitchen came warm odors, and the house announced, “Your dinner, Citizens.” He knew he would find the food on the table and the places set. The children would be spoiled wretched.

“Pull my pants up, Daddy,” called Sunflower, having used the potty. There was still something a parent was good for.

Raincloud added, as he rose to help Sunflower, “It’s either that or send her to the Sharers with Doggie.”

He did not reply, as Hawktalon approached the dinner table.

Raincloud sat at the table, admiring the exotic meal. “By the way, dear, you’ll never guess who met me for lunch today.”

“Not Iras?” Giving Sunflower a pat on the bottom, he lifted the child way overhead to “fly like a spaceship.” Then he put him down and watched him run off on tiptoe to wash his hands.

“No, for some reason Iras doesn’t answer. It was that logen of yours, Kal Anaeashon.”

Blackbear stopped still. For a moment he felt as if an electric shock had passed through him. The memory of that strange encounter came back. Then he shook himself, puzzled.

“Do sit down,” Raincloud insisted.

“Kal Anaeashon? Whatever did he want?”

“Why, he said you’d met his ‘mate,’ so he returned the compliment! Raincloud grinned at him. “A good excuse as any. He’s not at all forward, I must say. Nor bad looking, with his silver hair. He’d make a good second consort,” she teased.

Blackbear laughed. “Kal’s taste is for men.”

“Really.” Raincloud thought this over. “That explains it, then. Most Elysians who want to meet me have one thing in mind.”

Whatever was Kal up to, he wondered.

“He asked after you,” she added, “and after Sunflower, and even Doggie. Can you imagine, an Elysian taking notice of a trainsweep?”

“Doggie, Doggie!” chanted the two children, banging their forks on the table. Hawktalon crowed, “We’re visiting Doggie tomorrow!”

“Yes,” Raincloud assured her, “we’re visiting Doggie tomorrow. You’d better be on your best behavior, or the fleshborers will get you.”

In the wake of the seaswallowers, the ocean below was blue after all, as sparkling blue as in the video brochure. The blue horizon was so sharp against the pale blue sky that it looked like a paper cutout. Blackbear had never seen such a clear horizon, in all his years on Bronze Sky.

“Are we there yet?” demanded Sunflower for the fourth or fifth time, strapped into his seat in the shuttlecraft.

Hawktalon held her video map up to her face; Blackbear hoped this was not a sign of nearsightedness, which would mean delicate surgery. “No, we just passed Loryu-el raft. Kshiri-el is the next one in this raft cluster. Sharer rafts always come in clusters of eight,” she added importantly.

Raincloud looked intently out the window, while Draeg seemed lost in his thoughts. Raincloud had visited Draeg’s home before, but for Blackbear it would be the first time.

“Prepare for landing on Kshiri-el, Citizens,” came the cheerful servo voice.

The raft below looked like a cut-off tree trunk whose roots still radiated outward and stretched below the surface. The “surface,” though, was ocean, and the “roots” were branches dense with green foliage. The central area of the raft was covered with other sorts of plants, commensal or parasitic to some degree. Matted leaflets, like ground pine, squished underfoot. Fanwings circled above, emitting sighing cries; one of them swooped and snatched up a legfish from the raft.

Blackbear welcomed the fresh air in his lungs and followed Draeg across the raft, holding firm onto Sunflower’s ankles as the child straddled his back; safer than the shoulders, as the child had grown. Hawktalon skipped along happily. “You’re sure the trainsweep’s all right?” he asked anxiously, dreading disappointment for them.

“It’s had royal treatment,” Draeg assured him. “Sharers don’t often get fugitives to look after nowadays.”

A silkhouse rose before them, its blue and green saddle-shaped panels fitted together into concave spires. At raft-level, one of the panels suddenly dilated, like a mouth opening in surprise. Two Sharers emerged, completely purple and hairless, and held out their webbed hands. Blackbear knew Sharers did not wear clothes, but the sight of these unclothed goddesses made him less uncomfortable than he expected.

“Leresha the Coward, and her lovesharer Eerea the Lazy,” Raincloud whispered. Lovesharers could make daughters together, with the help of the lifeshaper to fuse the ova and provide the “paternal” methylation patterns.

From out of the silkhouse “mouth” crept the cherished trainsweep.

“Doggie!” Hawktalon got down and embraced her, the six legs flexing beneath her weight. Doggie seemed to have fared well enough in exile. The crayon drawings on her back had faded in the sun.

“Down, Daddy!” insisted Sunflower. The child hurried off, then shrieked, having caught his toe in the matted greenery and fallen on his face. Raincloud picked him up, saying, “You’ve got to stop toe-walking, dear.”

Leresha spoke with Draeg and Raincloud in a melodious voice, a language which seemed all vowels.

“Did Doggie cause any trouble? Ask her, Raincloud,” said Blackbear.

Raincloud spoke in the same melodious language. The Sharer gestured toward the trainsweep and the children. “Doggie’s no trouble, Leresha says,” Raincloud told him. “But Sunflower’s knee looks bad. We ought to fix it up.”

Sunflower was bleeding profusely at the knee, for the scab had scraped open at the same place where he was hurt the day before. Alarmed, Blackbear hurried over to take a look. “Could we wash it off?” No servo medic was about to come, he realized. He reached for gauze and antiseptic from his own pack.

“Leresha says we can take him below to the lifeshaper,” Raincloud explained.

Leresha added, in Elysian, “He will fix his bruise by the lifeshaper.”

Blackbear eyed the Sharer more closely; and for a moment, what he saw made him forget the bleeding child.

Leresha’s skin was not smooth as amethyst, like that of her lovesharer. She was patterned all over with fibrous scars, crisscrossing her body, as if every patch of skin had been transplanted. What trauma could have happened to her that even the lifeshapers could not fix—or would not?

“The lifeshaper will fix him,” Raincloud agreed with a firm look at Blackbear. “Come along, Doggie,” she added, knowing the child would not be parted from the trainsweep. Blackbear was less than eager to try out novel medical treatment on his own son. It was only a scrape, he told himself; still, he would watch that “lifeshaper” like a hawk. Reluctantly he followed Raincloud into the silkhouse.

The interior was filled with an otherworldly bluish light, filtered from the upper panels of seasilk. The lower panels were covered with brilliant yellow swirls of moss or fungus, a non-Torran organism that combined fungal metabolism with mosslike leaves and rhizoids. Sharers “painted” their walls with it, in patterns of striking beauty.

Leresha led everyone down a hole into the woody interior of the raft. The lifeshaper appeared, a smooth-skinned purple goddess introduced as Yshri the Foolish One. Blackbear sat Sunflower on his lap, and Doggie crept right up to his leg to get a better look. What an odd little machine.

The lifeshaper bathed the child’s knee in a clear liquid. Then she applied a plant stem which twisted suddenly like a snake. Blackbear felt his hair stand on end, and he nearly snatched the child away.

“It’s all right,” Raincloud whispered. “Who do you think taught the Elysians all they know?”

From the twisting stem, a pink substance oozed out and worked its way smoothly into the scraped knee. “There, Daddy,” said Sunflower. “It’s all better now.”

Anesthetic, he thought. But more—something odd was happening to the knee. Instead of clotting over, the edges of wound had merged seamlessly with the pink substance, as if already growing into new skin. He watched, hardly believing his eyes.

“Thanks,” he told Yshri, imagining what marvels he could learn here. “I’d like to see your facilities some time.” Egg fusion, limb regeneration, eco-engineering—it was hard to imagine these things in such a seemingly primitive setting.

“I would gladly share learning with you,” said the lifeshaper, “in another week’s time. Today my apprentices are all out celebrating.”

Draeg added, “It’s the end of the swallower season. Just wait till tonight when the waterfire comes out!”

“We have to catch the shuttle,” warned Raincloud.

“Oh, all right. I’ll give you brothers a quick tour, anyhow,” Draeg insisted. “There’s the flying squid mating pool, and the shockwraith’s lair; and there’s even a war memorial, from the ‘Great Deathhastening’...”

Draeg and the Windclans formed a ragged parade across the raft, Sunflower riding triumphantly atop the trainsweep. Blackbear groaned inwardly, foreseeing the squalls when it came time to depart. “If only we could just take the servo home,” he muttered to Raincloud.

“Leresha asked me about that,” Raincloud told him. “She needs to know why Doggie is here, why the trainsweep was cast out.”

“Well, if she finds out she can tell us.”

Draeg paused. “Look out there,” he pointed toward the horizon. “See that little raft offshoot way out?”

A small patch of gray-green could be seen, like a smudge on the horizon.

“A raft branch dips underwater,” Draeg explained, “then comes up to sprout an offshoot raft, a kind of vegetative propagation. Now out there on that offshoot raft sits a Sharer unspoken; that’s the worst punishment a Sharer can get from the Gathering.”

“What was her crime?” Blackbear asked.

“She stole fish from another raft’s nets. She’s ‘sick,’ the others say. They bring her food, of course.”

Raincloud observed, “It works the other way, too. A Sharer can unspeak the whole Gathering.”

“Of course; if you’re mad at your Gathering, you can go sit out there until they mend their ways. A queer lot, these Sharers.”

Hawktalon pulled at the flare of her mother’s trousers. “Doggie’s trying to tell us something, Mother.”

Raincloud stopped. “Really? How do you know?”

“Listen.”

Raincloud crouched down beside the trainsweep and listened. Blackbear drew nearer, but all he could hear was the murmuring ocean.

“She squeaks,” Raincloud observed. “It’s a called ‘sonic byproduct.’”

“Well,” said Hawktalon, “she does that whenever she wants something.”

Blackbear regarded his daughter in puzzlement.

“Come, Brothers,” Draeg called back to them. He turned, leading them inward away from the ocean, up a gentle rise to the rim of the central hollow. “The war memorial lies here.” His foot extended and scraped at an old slab of raftwood, which someone must have cut out and set here long ago. Its surface was scorched black. “It’s from Raia-el, a raft long dead. They don’t last more than a couple of hundred years. On this spot, during the Great Deathhastening, the Valan invaders burned six Sharers in whitetrance; literally burned them down.”

Blackbear shook his head. “It’s hard to believe. The Valans are... so modern.”

“They’ve had a thousand years to grow up. Every people is born in blood.”

“The Clickers weren’t,” objected Blackbear. “Our founders drew together under the Dark One, but we hurt no one.”

Draeg laughed. “What about your own planet—terraformed! How do you know what alien souls were lost?”

“Nonsense,” said Blackbear uneasily. “They tested for sentient life.” Any finding of nonhuman sentient intelligence had to be reported to the Secretary of the Free Fold. None had ever been found.

Raincloud said, “The Sharers were not born in blood.”

“That may be true. But who protects the Sharers today? Who fends off the hungry hordes?”

Blackbear looked up, and his gaze swept the surroundings: the endless razor-sharp horizon, the stately fanwings sailing across the sky, an occasional flying squid rocketing out of the water. “It’s so beautiful,” he exclaimed. “If all people could only see such beauty, there would be an end to wars.”

Draeg shook his head. “You can’t eat scenery. There will always be war on the poor.”

“Now Draeg,” said Raincloud. “You can’t blame all your world’s troubles on everyone else. It’s your own government that’s corrupt and mismanaged.”

Had anyone else spoken thus, Blackbear thought, they would have ended up in the dirt. But Draeg had a rare respect for Raincloud. He regarded her with dignity, then replied. “Do you suppose the sewer drinkers have much say in things? Whose cash keeps all the corrupt ones in power? Wouldn’t your Elysian Guardians support even the Urulite Imperator, if he served their interests?”

No one answered. A brisk wind picked up, sighing over the raft. The trainsweep crept in between the children, listening.

Chapter 3

Raincloud lay back and stretched like a cat, watching Blackbear out of half-closed eyelids. She reached over, stroking the mushroom that she longed to devour. Sometimes he seemed so beautiful, almost blinding to look at.

As she relaxed on the bed, something thumped faintly beneath the skin of her belly. She put her hand to it, but it was still too small to palpate. Then the thumping came again, rhythmically. The little one must be having hiccups.

“Anyone home?” asked Blackbear.

“She’s quickened.” Raincloud smiled and squeezed his hand. This was always the best part of pregnancy, when the sickness was gone and the little one started playing about. A good thing I’m not a Sharer, she thought. Sharers conceived only once or twice in a lifetime, and then only by consent of the Gathering.

Blackbear watched her with a beatific smile. “We’re so lucky,” he murmured.

Sadness swept over her again, to think of Falcon Soaring, and the call of the High Priestess, which she herself might have answered. But, she told herself, Falcon Soaring certainly did not want Raincloud’s child; she wanted one of her own. “I’ll talk to Mother tomorrow,” she told Blackbear. “I’ll tell her that our child’s quickened. And I’ll tell her about the clinic in Founders City.”

The interstellar call would not be free of charge, like the Elysian holostage. It would cost more than a day’s pay. It required a special link through sub-folds into the Fold that connected the star systems outside space-time, and then her mother in Tumbling Rock would have to ride her horse to Caldera Station. Nevertheless, Raincloud had to see her mother in person to share the wonderful news. If only she could hug her, too.

When the call came in, the family hovered excitedly around the holostage. And then, unbelievably, there was her mother Windrising.

The sight of her mother’s face came as a shock at first; the wrinkles, which Raincloud somehow had not recalled, after months among satin complexions. Still, the face was the very image of Hawktalon, who resembled her grandmother the more the years passed. And her shoulders flexed, strong as ever, beneath her immaculate black braids; Raincloud’s father was a master at braiding.

“Raincloud!” she cried. Her trousers swished and the fiery embroidery swirled around as she took a step forward. “You nightfallen goddess—What sort of show is this? I can see you all around, large as life, but you’re nothing but a ghost.”

Windrising had a yearling granddaughter tucked under one arm. The little dark face stared wide-eyed at the holostage, a stuffed bird hanging by its beak from her fist. “Congratulations on Hawktalon’s birthday, too. I’ve added two dams to her herd.”

“Couldn’t you send them here?” begged Hawktalon. “We could keep them out on a raft—”

“That’s enough, dear,” interrupted Raincloud.

“And how’s my little owlet?” inquired Windrising.

Sunflower hid behind his father, suddenly shy.

“Nightstorm misses you to pieces, Raincloud. You were always her favorite sister.”

“I know, Mother.”

“I’ve saved the best of our apples for you. Your nieces have kept the goats well, including the newborn kids. One got hoof rot, but we had it treated right off and the barn cleaned out. The geyser is running strong, and the pipes are in shape; your stock kept plenty warm all winter. You should see the mudfield since the last eruption: all orange around the center, turning reddish purple around the edges now.” The algae grew up fast after the geyser erupted, different species at different temperatures, changing as the mud cooled.

“Mother, I’ve got news for you: My child’s quickened.”

“So I guessed. Congratulations! May you have ten more.”

“Thank you.” She imagined what that would be like, ten little ones climbing over Blackbear.

“Lynxtail’s quickened, too, her fifth.” Lynxtail was Windrising’s second-born daughter.

“That’s wonderful. But you know, mother...” For some reason, what had seemed straightforward in her mind before was now all confused. “Falcon Soaring wants her own child, too, doesn’t she? It can be done in Founders City; Blackbear knows the clinic.”

Windrising waved an impatient hand. “What do men know? The clan looked into all that. She can’t be cured.”

Raincloud was taken aback a moment. “She can’t be cured, exactly, but her—her own cells can make a child that’s hers and her consort’s. Blackbear knows; he’s a doctor, Mother.”

“Of course he is. The best, too; I’ve heard nothing but complaints since he left.”

Raincloud winced at this double-edged compliment. Blackbear had tried hard to arrange a good replacement for his patients.

“Well, you can talk to the High Priestess. If you were home, you might have helped Falcon Soaring yourself. I know it’s hard, but you would earn the darkest honor.”

Raincloud’s head rang for a moment, and she had to catch herself. The very thought of parting with her unborn was devastating. She felt ashamed, then angry at her mother for refusing to listen. But after all, what could she expect? Outside Elysium, most people distrusted gene engineering; and Clickers could be downright superstitious.

“How is that strange planet, out there in the stars? I hope those immortal folk, they all treat you like a goddess,” her mother added.

“Yes, Mother. Shora is a lovely planet.”

“Don’t suppose you like it too much, now?” She was probably thinking of her “lost” daughter, Running Wolf, and feared for adventuresome Raincloud.

“Don’t worry,” Raincloud assured her with a smile. “I’m not about to settle in this bauble they call Helicon.”

Her mother laughed. “I should say not. Will you be home for the Day of the Child?”

“Sorry, no,” she replied. They could not possibly afford the fare.

“You’ll miss Straight Oak’s wedding, too. It’s always sad to give a son away, but the Graymountainclan is just a half day’s journey.”

The house interposed, “Your five minutes are up. Extension will cost another hundred credits.”

“Good-bye...” Windrising’s granddaughter waved the bird at them and opened her mouth for the first time. But just then, the image winked out.

Raincloud bit her lip, staring vacantly through the empty column of light. It was frustrating to get things straight across twenty light-years. “I’ll write the High Priestess,” she decided. “And Nightstorm—I’ll send her the address of that clinic. She’ll talk to Falcon Soaring.”

Blackbear nodded understandingly. “You’re doing the best you can for your cousin.”

She drew a breath. “Now, as for our firstborn...”

They had a long conference at the holostage with the generen of the Helishon. The generen, Sorl Helishon, was a round-faced man with smooth sandy hair that flowed nearly to his waist. Raincloud could read Blackbear’s disapproval in his face, to see a man with his hair undone and long enough for any goddess to drag him off. Taking a breath, she told herself to be broad-minded. “Will a ‘defective’ really be welcome at your shon?” she asked the man bluntly.

Dimples appeared disarmingly in his smile, but his voice when he spoke carried the distinct note of authority. “The shonlings will love to meet a Bronze Skyan,” said the generen. “We have hosted several Bronze Skyan children. But yours would be the first Clicker from the Caldera Hills.”

“Who will be her teacher?” Raincloud wanted to know.

“Her teacher will be one of our own nanas,” Sorl explained. “Each nana has no more than ten children, and I myself keep watch over all. But Hawktalon will adore her nana. All our nanas have the highest educational training. The best education in the Fold—that’s what we offer at the Helishon.”

Blackbear sewed a jumpsuit for Hawktalon like those the Elysian shonlings wore, parti-colored sleeves and pantaloons gathered at the wrists and ankles, with a little goat stitched onto her sleeve for good luck. Hawktalon was so excited that she spent all day drawing pictures of what the shon would be like. At last, when the fateful day came, she awoke at six in the morning, dressed herself in half a minute, and came to breakfast with Fruitbat under her arm and her trusty rattleback stone in her pocket.

At the holostage in the hall stood the shaft of light, like sunshine through a ceiling window. That was how it always looked to Hawktalon, except that whereas sunshine kept a discreet silence, the people on the holostage were full of blather. Her mother never said so, but she always got that look in her eye and her lip curved down, whenever a guardian or an ambassador appeared.

“It’s the L’liite ambassador this morning, Mother,” Hawktalon informed her, dipping her spoon into her oatmeal. “Is he telling the truth today?” The distinction between truth and untruth was a source of fascination for her; like one of her father’s skeins of wool after Sunny had played with it, it required endless untangling. “Truth, or not?”

Her father muttered, “That would be the day.” He never believed anything he saw in the shaft of light.

Her mother said, as if lecturing, “There are different kinds of truth. It is true that many L’liites lack food to eat. It’s been that way for generations; that is why our Clicker ancestors emigrated.”

“The one here looks well fed.” Hawktalon twisted her spoon. “If there are different kinds of truth, can something be true of one kind and untrue of another?”

“Hawktalon,” her father put in, “you need to eat what’s in your spoon, or you’ll be late for the shon.”

She swallowed the spoonful of oatmeal, then another. “I’ll learn all about truth at the shon” she mumbled, her mouth full. “Soon I’ll know even more than you.”

The transit vesicle flowed smoothly up the reticulum. Hawktalon loved to watch the incoming walls of a neighbor vesicle merge together and open, like modeling clay, while new people and servos emerged into view. Sometimes a servo from each vesicle would exchange greetings of a sort, a high-pitched squeaking sound. The greeting sound was a different pitch from the sound a servo made when you told it, “You’re not really a person.”

Not all servos squeaked, of course, but some squeaked quite a lot. Doggie had several different squeaks; one meant “Come play with me,” another meant “I need recharging.” Out on the raft of the naked goddesses, Doggie had kept squeaking, “I need,” but it was not recharging that she needed. She needed something from the Sharers, but Hawktalon could not figure out what. Poor thing; Doggie must be lonely out there, and Hawktalon missed her as badly as she missed her goats.

Perhaps her nana at the shon could tell her about servo-squeak. The shon contained all the knowledge there ever was, Lorl had told her in Daddy’s laboratory.

“Next stop,” her mother warned, rising from the chair, which grew up into a rail to lean on. Her father, holding Sunny, rose with them.

Hawktalon got up, feeling the unfamiliar pantaloons hugging her ankles. The costume felt so different from her wide-bottomed trousers, she felt as if she inhabited a different body today. She was different, she decided; she was a magic person today, and she could cast powerful spells. Truth or untruth?

The home of the shon, which Hawktalon had passed several times on shopping trips, was definitely a magic place, a building like no other. All other buildings were of one color; but the surface of the shon changed color continually, like the rings of algae around a geyser, only faster. First it was pink, then as you approached the pink hue deepened, turning orange, then faded imperceptibly to pale green, darkening as you arrived. Each time it was different, of course, so that you never could tell what color it would be when you entered. Today the wall turned bright yellow just as they approached and a door shaped open. A good omen, a good color to start her lucky day.

A servo approached, unlike any other she had seen. The servo was padded all over, like a cloth doll, wearing a thick spreading skirt with bright geometric designs. She looked huggable, Hawktalon thought. Moreover, her faceplate had delightful cartoon features that actually moved as she spoke, like a real face. She said, “What fun to meet you, Hawktalon. I’m sorry the generen was called away just now. I’m Nana.”

Her father pulled her back close. His arm was tense, and that made Hawktalon tense, too. Her heart beat faster as she looked up at him, then back at the plump huggable servo. Suddenly she thought, maybe she did not really want to go to the shon today. She wanted to go home with Daddy.

Nana said, “Are you Hawktalon? You’re named after a bird, aren’t you? Are you joining us today?”

Hawktalon dutifully extended her doll. “This is—” She added, “Fruitbat,” in Click-click.

Nana bent at the waist, her skirt brushing the floor, as she looked at the doll. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Fruitbat,” she told the doll, pronouncing perfectly. “I’d like to know why Fruitbat wants to come to our shon.”

“To learn things,” said Hawktalon carefully.

“To learn things. And what would you most like to learn?”

That put her off guard. She recalled the one Elysian sentence about learning that she had memorized at Science Park. “‘Where learning is shared, the waterfall breaks through the cataract.’”

“She knows the classics,” exclaimed Nana happily.

Raincloud demanded, “Where is the generen?”

“There comes the generen now,” said Nana, her cartoon faceplate nodding toward an Elysian down the hall whose talar swished as he approached. It was the long-haired one from the holostage. His silk-smooth hair fascinated Hawktalon, who had never seen anything like it before she left Tumbling Rock. She wondered what it felt like to the touch.

Nana added, “The generen and subgenerens monitor us around the clock. If I ever fail you, please report my defect to...”

Hawktalon moved closer, filled with sudden curiosity. She whispered quickly, “Can you tell me why servos squeak sometimes?”

“That’s a very good question,” said Nana. “Perhaps you’ll find out for yourself, when you learn to build a servo of your own.”

“Build a servo? My own?”

“It’s one of our morning activities.”

“Can I build a trainsweep?”

“Certainly, dear, although you won’t need one for a few decades yet.”

The shonlings were practicing their reading. They took turns calling out Elysian words from letters that danced magically in the air above a broad stage and turned into smiling faces when the word was correct. They were all boys, their unbound hair hanging flat; another couple of years and it would be up in turbans, in Tumbling Rock. They looked like normal children, except that they horsed around rather ineffectually. When one took a swipe at another, the one struck usually fell down and got scraped, instead of flipping the first one over. They reminded her of her young cousin who had been confined to bed for some months with scarlet fever and forgot how to use his arms and legs.

A boy tugged her sleeve. His hair was yellow with a slight wave, his face paler than a newborn’s, and his eyes were startlingly blue. “I’m Maris. I’m an artist. What are you?” When Hawktalon did not answer, he added, “Don’t you know what’s in your own genes?” Maris pointed at the embroidered goat on her sleeve. “What’s that?”

Hawktalon returned his curious blue-eyed stare. “It’s a goat, of course,” she said, thinking, they did not know all that much in this shon.

“But how was it done?” the dumb boy wanted to know. “I mean, what sort of machine part could pull the thread all the way through and back out at a different spot?”

Another boy peered closer for a look, then another. “It’s true,” one murmured. “It’s all done with one thread, not like regular sewing.”

“My father did it,” said Hawktalon, feeling proud.

“Yes, but how?” insisted Maris.

She blinked, puzzled. “Well, he pushes the needle in one side, then pulls it out the other.”

“Oh, I see. It would take a skinny servo to creep through like that! Could you show me how to do it?”

Hawktalon shook her head. “Sewing is for boys.”

“Only boys?” said Maris. “Why couldn’t I do it?” said another one.

“Why only boys?” echoed the others.

Some of the boys were girls. Hawktalon blinked at them, as if her eyes had gone out of focus. Girls, some of them, whose fathers had not braided their hair. Like Lorl, she remembered; it had taken her a week to realize Lorl was a goddess.

Maris was a girl. She tilted her head, her hair flowing over her bright green sleeve. “Why only a boy? Unless he has to hold the needle with his pee-pee.”

The other girls and boys screamed and giggled, repeating, “He holds it with his pee-pee!”

Hawktalon’s face burned, and her fists clenched. If only one of them would rush at her, she would toss her clear across the room.

“Time to work on your servos,” Nana called. “Hawktalon, you may observe the others today, and get ideas for what you might like to build.”

“Come see mine,” whispered Maris. “It’s nearly done.”

The shonlings were rushing across the room to the hallway. They came to a room full of mechanical constructions, brightly colored, emitting popping noises and occasional bars of music. Maris’s construction looked something like an overgrown cuckoo clock; its frame was twice her height. From a window at the base appeared a mechanical green mouse that wiggled its head and started to climb up a miniature spiral staircase. Halfway up the frame, the mouse stopped and pulled a string. A bell chimed, and a shower of glitter fell down into a pan. The glitter assembled itself into a bird with red and blue feathers and a long silver tail. The bird flapped its wings and sang. At the top of the frame, a door flew open.

The action stopped. Pops and whistles were heard from another child’s construction nearby.

“Now I’m going to make something come out the door,” Maris explained. She placed a chunk of nanoplast on a small stage beneath a bright light source. The nanoplast shaped itself this way and that.

Feeling dizzy, Hawktalon withdrew and put her hands in her pockets protectively. There was too much new to see all at once; she closed her eyes for a moment. Then she hugged Fruitbat and pulled out her rattleback stone.

The stone was a carved oblong of obsidian, with a rounded base like a half-egg twisted off center. With a flip of her wrist, the stone spun around clockwise. It slowed and started to wobble up and down, until it ceased turning for a brief instant; then it turned counterclockwise, gathering speed. It rotated thirteen times more before it finally stopped. Not bad, Hawktalon thought, giving it another spin.

Blue-eyed Maris tugged her sleeve again. “How does it do that?” Maris asked. “Does the nanoplast send out tiny jets of air? Or a magnetic force, perhaps?”

“It’s not nanoplast,” said Hawktalon scornfully. “It’s magic.”

Another girl-or-boy came over, saying, “Let me see, too.”

Hawktalon let Maris pick up the stone. She turned it over, looking at the twisted half-egg. “Its underside is skewed,” Maris said. “It must be biased somehow to turn one way.” She set the stone down, then pushed down on one end.

The stone wobbled up and down a few times. Maris pushed it again, at a corner. This time the stone wobbled, then turned briskly counterclockwise. “It converts up-and-down wobble into counterclockwise turn. It turns toward the overhanging weight of the upper part. I bet I can make one.” She picked up the stone and placed it next to a piece of nanoplast upon a little stage. At a command, the nanoplast shaped itself into a replica of the rattleback stone.

For the rest of the hour, several children experimented with the rattleback shape, making samples that were longer or thicker, or had differing proportions at the rounded base. One shape actually reversed itself both ways, seeming unhappy with whatever direction it found itself turning. No one could quite explain that one.

By lunch hour Hawktalon wondered where the time had gone, and after lunch she eagerly sat down beside Maris for “afternoon meeting” with Nana. Nana knelt on the floor before them, her layered skirts spreading around her. Two of the children hurried up to sit in her skirts, nestling next to her.

“Today we have two exciting things to share,” she told the children, “both having to do with foreign worlds.”

“Wow, foreign worlds,” exclaimed a child. “Can we hold another craft fair?”

“Please raise your hand,” Nana reminded him. “First, I’d like you all to welcome our new guest shonling, Hawktalon Windclan, from Bronze Sky. It’s a rare treat for us to have a guest from Bronze Sky, the most geologically active planet inhabited by humans. Here’s a view of a volcano that erupted in Hawktalon’s neighborhood just last year.”

A sunshine-light appeared, containing the panorama of Black Elbow, the mountain dwarfed by the billowing clouds that had spewed upward and spread for thousands of kilometers. Hawktalon remembered the sound of the explosive eruption, and the layer of ash that had covered the ground outside over the next few days. Tumbling Rock was several hills away from the eruption, but another Clicker town was less fortunate. A cousin of hers, married into the Graymountainclan, had been caught trying to outrun the blast. Hawktalon recalled the funeral procession, the High Priestess with the snakes, her dead cousin wrapped in white, and the little white bundle beside, his youngest daughter.

“Hawktalon’s name comes from a bird,” Nana added. “It’s a very beautiful bird.”

The volcano vanished, as things had a way of doing in the sunshine-light. A bird appeared, startlingly three-dimensional, and twice as large as Hawktalon had ever seen. It was a blue-speckled hawk, its small black eyes staring, its feathers ruffling now and then. She gasped and smiled happily. “Yes, that’s me!”

“That’s you?” A child giggled.

“Now remember,” said Nana, “all of us will help Hawktalon to feel at home with us. Perhaps in a week or so she’ll feel like sharing more about herself with us.”

Maris raised her hand.

“Yes, Maris?”

“Can she tell us about her parents?”

“We’ll see about that. Hawktalon, since our children do not have ‘parents,’ naturally they are always curious. Now shonlings, your generen is just arriving with an important announcement.”

The generen, her mother had explained, was something like a school principal. He entered the room just as Nana spoke; but how did Nana know he was coming just then? His hair flowed like water down the back of his bright red Elysian robe bordered with iridescent heliconians. Hawktalon felt her scalp prickle; only a magic person, she thought, could wear hair so straight and long. As he entered, the children clustered around him, stroking his hair and telling him what they had done that day.

“Did you see me?” Maris demanded. “Did you see me figure out the rattleback stone?”

“Of course I did, Maris,” said the generen. “That was very clever of you. Now, I’ll get a chance to talk with every one of you; but first, a very special announcement.” The generen sat down with the children and brushed his hair behind his shoulders. “One of you asked about the craft fair. We all recall how wonderful it was to entertain guests from so many far stars, and how especially wonderful the Urulite exhibit was.”

Heads nodded vigorously.

“Well, we’ve just received approval for a new interstellar project: an official children’s exchange program.”

A child raised a hand. “What’s a children’s exchange?”

“That means children from other worlds will visit our shon, and our shonlings will visit families on other worlds. We’re inviting all the worlds who sent delegates to our craft fair.”

Chapter 4

Blackbear took a Visiting Day at home, just in case Hawktalon called for him to rescue her. To leave his firstborn daughter with a servo all day—the thought still made his skin crawl.

Yet the hours passed with no frantic call. Half-disappointed, Blackbear set himself to stitching garments for the gifts on the Day of the Child. Embroidered suits for Raincloud’s mother and father, smaller ones for her various nieces and nephews; and although he was not obligated, he could not resist a matched set for the twin daughters of his brother Quail. Quail, a mountain of a man over two meters tall, had been blessed with twin daughters right after twin sons, and he still managed to carry all four of them. Blackbear felt his chest tighten. He wanted so badly to see him again and swing all the little ones into the air. But the best they could do for the holidays was to see each other long-distance.

“Can I help?” offered the house solicitously, as Blackbear began to cut the cloth. “I’ve figured out your pattern by now.”

Could the house really copy his sewing? It produced food and books, after all. The offer tempted him. “All right,” he muttered, ashamed of his laziness. He was getting as soft as those Elysians. “Could you make one for a goddess about the size of Raincloud, except two centimeters taller?” That would be her mother’s size.

“Certainly, Citizen.”

Minutes later, the kitchen window opened. A garment appeared, identical to Raincloud’s trousers, down to the details of embroidered foxes round the hems. His jaw fell. “Could you do one plain, without the embroidery? I have to make that distinctive.” There was still something he had to do himself.

Later Alin came over to practice rei-gi. Blackbear’s inability to be thrown still astonished him. “Let me attack from behind again,” the logen insisted, taking care to turn off the public transmitter first.

Blackbear grinned. He turned away from Alin, set his feet apart slightly, and let his arms relax in the spirit of the Dark One.

From behind him Alin padded lightly across the mat. He had learned the hard way not to reach upward, a distinctly unbalanced position. Instead he grabbed Blackbear across his lower arms, intending to lock on with his elbows and force Blackbear down.

Blackbear locked Alin’s forearms to his chest, sliding his own right leg forward and bending at the knee. In the next instant he pivoted his right side down and his left side up. His arms released, and Alin landed an arm’s length away.

Sunflower clapped. “Hooray for Daddy!”

“I saw how you did that,” exclaimed Alin. “Let me try it this time.”

“Are you sure?” asked Blackbear warily, for an inexpert throw was more likely to cause injury. “Remember, you have to bend at just the right moment.”

“Let’s replay it first.”

The pair of them reappeared on the holostage, in slow motion, Blackbear bending and twisting down just as Alin’s arms clasped about him. His timing was off, though, Blackbear thought. “I should have moved sooner; the throw would have been safer for you.”

“Foreign perfectionist,” Alin grumbled. “All right, let’s have it.” He turned his back and stood expectantly on the mat.

Blackbear caught him from behind, and sure enough Alin tossed him with a creditable twist. With a full somersault he met the mat, first the back of his wrist, then his shoulder, then his back, his legs sailing straight overhead. “Well done!” he exclaimed, pounding the mat with his palm. “That one is called ‘Bird Tilts its Head.’ You should try the ‘Tumbling Rock’ next.”

But Alin shook his head. “You weren’t thrown at all. You planned your fall exactly; your leggings sliced the air like a fan. Even in defeat you mock me.”

“I told you, there’s no such thing as defeat,” Blackbear insisted. “What starts as a contest turns into a... a dance,” he said for lack of a better word.

“A dance,” Alin repeated thoughtfully.

“My turn, my turn!” Sunflower rolled over twice on the mat.

“At least my audience is down to one,” Alin observed. “Where’s your girl?”

Blackbear winced, feeling a fresh stab of worry. “Hawktalon is at the Helishon.”

“How wonderful! Why not the little one, too?”

“Sunflower’s too young,” Blackbear curtly replied.

“You’re attached to him, aren’t you. Like Tulle and her capuchin. Have you been back to the lab yet?”

“No, but I’ll keep a closer eye on him.” The “accident” with the nanoplast distressed him acutely.

“Well, your Hawktalon’s a lucky girl,” Alin assured him. “I wish I could go back to my shon, sometimes. I still miss my nana.”

“Really? It’s just a machine,” said Blackbear. “A padded machine, like Kal’s ‘mate.’”

“Where do you think he got her? He picked up one of the nanas, back when he was generen of the Anaeashon. What a perverted example to set for the shonlings.” Alin shook his head. “You hear what Kal’s up to now? He’s brought your fertility research to the agenda of the Sharer World Gathering.”

“What? I thought the Guard turned it down. He lost the logathlon with Tulle,” Blackbear remembered.

“By a narrow margin. Anyway, Kal has connections among the Sharers.”

Blackbear frowned and looked away. He felt angry at this stab at his work, and yet he was curious to unravel the intentions of that enigmatic logen. “When is the World Gathering?”

“The Sharer World Gathering has two phases. First, all the rafts send wordweavers to ‘gather in’ issues that need chewing over: the numbers of children born, the populations of fish and seaweed, the pollution from our floating cities. The Gathering itself takes place six months later, after the seaswallowers have migrated back to the south pole.”

“So they’ll all ‘gather’ together, and decide we have to stop our research?”

“Any decision of the World Gathering is binding on Elysium. It’s a fundamental condition of our treaty. In practice, it rarely comes to that; even so, merely raising an issue puts pressure on the Guard.”

Hawktalon came home in raptures about the shon, her new friends, and the “servo” she would get to build. So Blackbear returned without her to the laboratory the next day.

As he and Sunflower approached the tissue culture room, something felt different. The hallway had changed its dimensions somehow; or was it the spacing of the rooms? He came to a halt, keeping a tight grip on Sunflower’s hand.

“Ow, Daddy, let me go,” the child complained. Blackbear’s heart sank, as he wondered how he would get anything done now.

Tulle strode quickly down to meet him, the metalmarks flashing on her talar. “Look what we’ve installed for you. ‘Open up, Toybox,’” she ordered to the wall.

The wall beyond the culture room opened into a large window, revealing a small boxlike room that had not existed before. “Good morning,” said the room. “I am your toybox. Won’t you play with me?” A marionette danced across the floor, a toy spaceship descended from the ceiling, and a locomotive tunneled out, followed by half a dozen cars crawling around in a circle.

Sunflower needed no second invitation. In a flash he had sprinted to the window, hauled himself over the ledge and clambered inside. The other lab members gathered to watch, laughing and making envious remarks.

“It’s wonderful,” Blackbear exclaimed, recovering from his surprise. “I’m sorry to put you to such trouble.”

“No trouble at all. We just pushed the next lab over a bit and reshaped some dead space from the ceiling. It was Alin’s idea; he spent yesterday evening ‘trying it out.’”

“It’s just like home. In Tumbling Rock, every room has a children’s corner.”

“Well why didn’t you say something? You can leave him, all right; it’s guaranteed childproof, and it will send an alarm if he tries to climb out.”

Onyx caught Blackbear’s arm. “Have you seen Pirin’s results on your Eyeless embryo?”

“Does it look good?”

“Well...”

“It’s interesting, though,” Tulle assured him.

Blackbear followed them to the embryo facility, leaving Sunflower to tell the toybox what toys he would like next. The simbrid embryo, containing the new Eyeless mutation, had developed within its artificial womb for the past eight weeks. By now its curled track of somites would have expanded into limb buds, and the heart tube would have folded itself into ventricles.

Pirin was viewing a recording of the mutant simbrid embryo which he had grown. “You’ll see its development from the beginning,” he said.

Upon the holostage the giant image of the embryo appeared, as it had the first day Blackbear had arrived at the laboratory, only this time it was a record of the live organism, not just a computed model. First the fertilized egg appeared, containing Blackbear’s mutant Eyeless gene somewhere in its tangled chromosomes. After many divisions, the cells expanded into a curl of somites with its beating heart tube. The heart tube expanded as the embryo grew, but then...

The heart tube did not fold over to form ventricles. Instead, just during the last few days of development, it twisted around itself and expanded as the embryo grew, bulging out into the abdomen. The pulse slowed as the bulge grew, distorting the embryo grotesquely.

Blackbear’s hair stood on end. The Eyeless gene had been isolated originally as a defect in the mesodermic eye covering; but no one had predicted an effect on the heart. How could he have let this happen?

“It’s most interesting,” Tulle insisted. “There are plenty of heart mutants, but this particular defect is one we’ve never seen before. We must definitely write it up.”

“But how did it happen?” Blackbear asked unsteadily. “The models predicted nothing like this.”

“Don’t take it so hard,” Onyx tried to reassure him. “It’s only your first mutant. We knew the Eyeless gene gets expressed in the heart tube, along with a dozen other tissues. I’ll bet a few parameter changes would make this defect show up in the model.”

“The germ cells did develop correctly,” Tulle said, pointing to the patch of red-coded cells. “The cells migrated to the genital ridges, and they did not degenerate. If this embryo survives long enough, it will be interesting to see whether the pre-egg cells start meiosis.”

Blackbear turned away, trying to hide his revulsion. It was all in the lab, he told himself. It was hard to remember, this was not the Hills where he practiced, where a deformed eight-week embryo meant a pregnancy ending in a stream of blood.

Afterward, Blackbear joined the others in the coffee room, where Hawktalon used to order ice cream. He missed her badly, resenting her apparent happiness at the shon. At the holostage Draeg watched a newscaster go on about the crashed L’liite ship and its unwanted passengers.

Pirin approached Blackbear, nodding sympathetically about the failed experiment. “You see now why the simbrid embryos are so important,” he said with a hint of satisfaction. “But Tulle is right—it’s exciting that the germ cells developed so far. I hope you’ll test another allele of Eyeless.”

The hot coffee burned his tongue, but he barely noticed. He began to see his project from a different angle. Here he was, mutating one gene after another, only to lead to endless “interesting” deformed embryos. The chance of ever reaching a fertile, ageless embryo seemed slight, at least for the near future. Tulle might not understand that; her own future extended rather longer than his.

But suppose they tried an entirely different approach? Raincloud’s question had set him wondering.

“Look here,” he told Pirin. “If our aim is for Elysians to make babies with their own genes, why not work with the chromosomes they’ve got? Why alter them?”

Tulle looked up from the capuchin, which nibbled tidbits out of her hand.

Pirin asked, “What are you getting at?”

Blackbear leaned on the counter. “In ‘normal’ mortal humans,” he said, avoiding the term “defective,” “you can generate germ cells out of undifferentiated tissue in the bone marrow. You put them into preovarian host tissue; then a substance from the culture attracts the new germ cells to migrate in and form egg cells—”

Pirin raised a hand. “Elysian cells won’t do it. Even if you can trick the germ cells into migrating, at meiosis, when the chromosomes ‘cross over,’ they’ll all fall apart. It’s because of the longevity treatment, which modifies the chromosomal DNA, adding acetyl groups, glucosamines, and so on. Elysian chromosomes are designed to avoid crossover, which in later life leads to defects and aging.”

“Suppose you reverse the longevity modifications,” Blackbear proposed. “Isolate the chromosomes and remove all their acetyl groups and glucosamines. Put back the methyl groups at all their natural positions.” It sounded like a tall order, for an entire genome of DNA, but no harder than the longevity treatment itself. “Put the chromosomes back into the germ cells, and make the egg cells. Then after fertilization, just redo the longevity treatment as usual.”

Pirin listened in silence. “It should work,” he admitted reluctantly. “It seems rather a brute force approach.” The Elysian student preferred more subtle points of developmental control.

“I like it,” said Onyx. “Why not? It would take a massive programming job on the nanomanipulaters, adjusting all those million methyl groups. But why not?”

“It could be done,” said Tulle. “I’m not sure, however, that I could justify a project of that size within the scope of my longevity research. And the expense would be prohibitive for the average citizen.”

What was expensive for Elysians would be out of sight for Bronze Skyans. Blackbear sighed. He thought again of Falcon Soaring, whose problem was trivial by comparison; if only she would try that clinic in Founders City.

“Still, you’ve got a point.” Tulle fed her capuchin another treat from the food window. “If we can do it—why not? If people buy it, the technology will improve and the cost will come down.”

Draeg looked over. “Sounds great, Brother. You’ll really get the Killer after you, now.”

“I know.” Tulle crossed her arms on the table, her eyes filled with sudden intensity. “That’s exactly what I have in mind. Why not force the issue? Let the citizens decide whether they want children of their own.”

“It’s a gamble,” Onyx warned her. “It could put us all out of business.”

“That may happen anyway,” said Draeg, “now that Kal’s gone to the Sharers behind our back.”

Blackbear walked slowly down to the tissue culture lab. Several other variants of Eyeless awaited trial in the simbrid embryo, yet now, somehow they seemed beside the point. He found himself wandering back to the coffee room, which was deserted now save for a news show on the holostage.

In the column of light a familiar figure caught his eye. Curious, he drew near, trying to place the figure, an Elysian goddess wearing orange-coin butterflies. It was Raincloud’s friend Iras Letheshon. Iras was being led down the street-tunnel by an ominous pair of octopods, their limbs waving back and forth like elephant trunks.

“... one of Helicon’s wealthiest citizens was taken into custody on her third visiting violation,” the voice-over explained, “after working ten days straight to broker a settlement of the L’liite credit crisis. She may now be reached in person only, for purposes of visiting, at the Palace of Rest.”

So Iras had finally got in trouble. Fascinated and repulsed, he stared at her train retreating between the implacable pair of servos.

Raincloud would want to know, he thought. “Please find Raincloud Windclan,” he told the holostage.

Raincloud appeared at a press conference in the Nucleus, along with those overdressed L’liites. He would not interrupt her, after all; but there was no harm in watching her a bit. He was getting over his timidity at “looking in” on people, an Elysian pastime. He especially adored peeking at Raincloud now and then. Unfortunately the shon was off limits to the public, else he could have watched Hawktalon, too. So he next looked in on Alin, who was conducting a logathlon somewhere.

Then he remembered Kal’s unexpected call upon Raincloud. “Find Kal Anaeashon,” he tried.

The diminutive silver-haired logen appeared on the holostage, striding down Elysian Fields Boulevard with his white train floating behind, his students in brighter colors beside him. There must be hidden cameras everywhere, Blackbear thought suddenly, even in the middle of the street. At any rate, Kal was occupied. With a sigh, Blackbear turned and headed back to work.

At lunchtime he had some trouble dragging Sunflower away from the toybox, but he managed at last, promising the boy could chase butterflies at the garden. They went to the butterfly pavilion as usual, the same one where Alin had taken him the first day.

To his surprise, as he entered, he saw Kal seated alone at a small table shaped like a half-moon. Even at a distance the man was unmistakable, his white talar adorned only by the one dried leaf. Blackbear had never seen Kal in this neighborhood, except for the day the logen had appeared to challenge Tulle.

His pulse raced. He walked over boldly and sat down at the table opposite Kal.

“I am honored,” said Kal with a nod.

Sunflower tiptoed over to the bench. “Where is my teddy bear?” the child demanded, much to Blackbear’s chagrin.

“I am so sorry,” Kal said in a low voice. “Teddy is at home, but I’ll bring him next time. And where is your excellent trainsweep?”

“Trainsweep?” echoed Sunflower eagerly. “Where’s Doggie? Let’s go find Doggie now, Daddy.”

“No Doggie,” said Blackbear firmly. “They took the trainsweep away,” he explained to Kal. “They said she was dangerous.”

“I’m sorry,” Kal sighed. “Cassi will be sad to hear that.”

Blackbear had told no one but Draeg what really became of the trainsweep. “How could Doggie be dangerous?” he asked.

“Her responses might have become unbalanced. She might have hurt your children.” Kal paused. “Then again, she might simply have developed a mind of her own. That would be the most dangerous of all.”

“Let’s find Doggie,” Sunflower persisted.

A servo waiter offered a tray of flower cakes that tasted of fruit and cinnamon. “Here, Sunny, have one,” Blackbear offered.

The child stuffed three in his mouth.

“Look.” Kal’s voice suddenly intensified as he pointed to a low-hanging branch. “Do you see that caterpillar? It is just forming its chrysalis....”

Blackbear blinked twice. Then his eyes caught it in focus. Hanging from the branch, the caterpillar had spun a thick cord of silk to secure itself. Its skin was already splitting over its head, to reveal the shiny pupal surface. Deep within, an incredible pattern of changes would gradually reshape the body, just as his embryos reshaped themselves.

“How is your project going?” Kal asked. “Your Eyeless gene?”

“We have a new plan,” Blackbear told him defiantly. “We can get around the fertility problem by undoing part of the longevity treatment of Elysian chromosomes, and making germ cells in tissue culture.”

Kal’s eye widened. Then he asked, “Why not just make synthetic chromosomes from scratch? You could do that, I suppose.”

Taken aback, Blackbear thought a moment. He shrugged. “It could be done, but it isn’t necessary. The modifications will do.” He added, “You can tell that to the Sharers, too.”

For a moment Kal seemed to withdraw. He passed his hand down over his face, as though he was tired, and he looked away. Then he looked up again. “You like this,” he observed. “You think it’s wonderful.”

“It’s breathtaking... the power of creation.” It was true; despite the frustrations, the excitement of a new discovery had a power all its own, beyond even that of extracting newborns on a hillside beneath a blood-dusted sky.

“Wonderful,” Kal repeated. “Manufacturing human beings, more like servos every day. I should watch your work more closely, but this term I had to take on a second section of philosophy. I don’t even keep up my visiting.”

“You may end up in the ‘Palace of Rest,’” warned Blackbear, thinking of Iras.

Kal laughed, and for a moment his face was transformed, an altogether different person, someone who enjoyed the absurdity of life. “You’re right,” said Kal. “I could end up in the Palace of Rest, for missing visitors. Students don’t count.”

“What exactly do you teach your students?” Blackbear asked curiously.

Kal thought a moment. “The ancients put the question, ‘What is man?’ What women were was obvious: Women were makers of children. Later, as children took less of our time, women had to ask the same question. Today, it’s the only question left.”

Blackbear frowned, puzzled. “Goddesses bear the children, but men raise them. Both serve the Dark One.”

Kal’s eyes widened. “Is that right? Thanks for teaching me this. Your view of humanity is nearly as striking as the Sharers’.”

His eyes narrowed, suspicious that the logen was laughing at him.

“For Sharers,” Kal went on, “to be human is to share; no other relation exists. For you Clickers, to be human is to serve...”

“To serve children, and one’s goddess, and the Dark One.”

“And the Dark One. Now, in Elysium, who serves?”

Blackbear thought a moment, then he smiled. “No wonder your machines seem more like humans.”

“More human than the humans, you mean. Never mind, I take no offense. Now, the Urulite view is exactly the reverse of the Clickers: To be human is to master, to master men, women, and chattel.”

“Even enslave them.”

“Even so. Urulites have even more trouble with us Elysians than you do.” Kal’s eyes smiled, as if enjoying a joke. “The Valans, now, are like tamed Urulites; instead of mastery, possession of material goods.”

Blackbear thought of Onyx, with her ropes of stone beads and her cheerful competence. “Valans are good people,” he muttered.

“Of course they are. No wonder the L’liites aspire to their example. But for L’liites, to be human is to suffer. They will suffer on, and demand ever more in the name of suffering, and never come to stand on their own feet.”

This last observation seemed less than charitable. “Now that you’ve put everyone else in a box, what about Elysians?”

“To be Elysian is to rejoice. To pursue joy forever.”

The unexpected reply silenced him.

“If we don’t age, what other pursuit makes sense? Though of course,” Kal went on, “there are complications. We Anaeans, for instance, tend to think too much, which gets in the way of rejoicing.”

For the moment, Blackbear thought, his head was full enough of thinking. He noticed Sunflower clutching at his pants.

Kal started to rise from his seat. “If you’ll excuse me, I won’t keep you from your work. Thank you; it’s been a pleasure. Again, I am sorry about your trainsweep.”

Blackbear’s heart beat faster. “They didn’t take the trainsweep,” he admitted suddenly. “We...”

Kal looked at him. “Transmitter off, please,” he told the table.

“Transmitter off, Citizen,” said a soft voice from the table. “Two hundred credits per minute.”

“We left her with the Sharers, on their raft,” Blackbear went on hurriedly, vastly relieved to tell someone. “She won’t hurt them, will she?”

“Hurt them? No, I’m sure she won’t. The Sharers, you say?”

“They took her in, as a fugitive. It was Raincloud’s idea...”

A look of amazement came over Kal’s face. “The Sharers took in a trainsweep as a fugitive?” He shook his head slowly. “As a fugitive, literally? You’re sure of that?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Raincloud speaks their language.” Seconds passed. Kal was paying good credits for this silence.

“And you,” he said at last, “you accuse me of stirring up trouble with the Sharers.”

Chapter 5

At dinner Raincloud shook her head over Iras. “Of course, we all knew she was in trouble...” No matter where they went “visiting,” Iras was sure to be cutting one billion-credit deal or another. And since the L’liite crisis, she had thrown all caution to the winds. “But still—how could a citizen be dragged off by those horrid octopods, just like that?”

“Goddess knows.” Blackbear chewed thoughtfully on his roast venison with black mushroom sauce. “Is there no court system, not even a hearing?”

“Maybe the house knows. Do you, House?”

“Certainly, Citizen,” the house replied. “Elysium has no court system because there is no crime.”

“But—but those octopods dragged her off.”

“Escorted her,” corrected the house. “She could have refused. She has before.”

“But... then why go along?”

“Refusal gets expensive. Besides, everyone needs a vacation. Our system is so humane.”

Blackbear shook his head, quite confused. “Who decides the verdict, and the sentence?”

“The City is an impartial observer.”

The “City,” he realized, meant the omniscient servo network. “No courts, no trial—you can’t run a city that way,” he insisted.

Raincloud said, “Maybe not Founders City, but what about Tumbling Rock? When did we last have a trial?”

He thought a moment. He could not remember ever having a trial in Tumbling Rock. Any dispute, whether over a stolen goat or a faithless consort, was taken straight to the Priestess.

From around the dinner table, Sunflower crept over and nudged Raincloud’s shoulder with his little chin. “Ready for dessert, Mother.”

On his plate, his grilled cheese was barely touched.

Raincloud squeezed him tenderly but said, “Finish your dinner, please.”

Sunflower’s lower lip thrust forward, and the corners of his mouth drooped dramatically. His little brow furrowed in. Returning to his place, he emptied his plate on the floor. “I finished it.”

A floor servo scuttled over and cleaned it up. Hawktalon laughed and clapped her hands.

“Enough, both of you,” said Raincloud angrily. “No dessert, for such a waste of food.”

“It’s not wasted, Mum,” Hawktalon said. “It all goes back to the matter processor. I know more than you do now about servos.”

Sunflower tugged Raincloud’s arm and screamed in her ear, “I want dessert, Mother!”

“It’s those flower cakes,” Blackbear explained apologetically. “He can’t get enough of them.”

Hawktalon added, “I’m building a servo at the shon. But not just a fancy toy, like the other children. I’m going to build a real servo that does something really important.”

The Palace of Rest was a towering structure that penetrated three street levels. Its shape reminded Raincloud of an overstacked ice-cream cone. The entrance corridor gave off into doorways that opened at unnerving angles. Raincloud hesitated, certain she would get lost in such a maze.

Iras came for her. She walked slowly for a change, like someone who had no particular place to go. She wore a plain talar of pale yellow, with a single butterfly at the shoulder. And her hair was done up in Clicker braids.

“How are you?” Raincloud asked uncertainly, her attention caught by the flame-colored braids.

Iras smiled with her usual dimples. “I’m fine. It was quite dramatic, really. They came for me at the Bank, while I had five different clients in view—”

“No discussion,” breathed the house voice, low and soothing. “We permit no discussion of professional matters. You may rest assured, Citizen, that all your affairs are in good hands.”

Annoyed, Raincloud looked around her. Houses were rarely so prescriptive. “How could they just pick you up? Can’t you at least call a logen?”

“I could.”

“But you’re in prison!”

“Palace of Rest,” Iras corrected. “The City has determined that I belong here, for my health. It’s only for two weeks.”

“But your affairs at the Bank—who will—”

“No discussion,” repeated the house.

“It’s useless, you see,” said Iras. “We’ll have to talk about acrobats or something.”

“Well, I can tell you what I’ve been up to,” Raincloud offered. “The L’liites treat me royally.”

“Not surprising, is it?” Bronze Sky was the L’liites’ main source of imported grains. They had sent extravagant gifts, even a new evening talar and train for Blackbear, if she could ever get him to wear it. Her own Elysian robe was getting tight around her expanding midsection, where the little hiccups and legs kicking could erupt at any moment. “The L’liites had a press conference,” she added. “They’re demanding a write-off of their defaulted loan, on the basis that—”

“No discussion,” breathed the voice again. “We may be required to request your departure, Citizen.”

She restrained herself from a dishonorable remark, and Iras laughed. “How can you laugh?” demanded Raincloud. “I’d break out of this place in a minute.”

“Oh no you wouldn’t. Come see how I’m entertained.”

Raincloud followed her down a winding corridor, wondering uneasily whether her friend had been drugged. The light grew dim, except for doorways on either side. The first doorway opened out onto a steep hillside, blowing with the scent of grass and wildflowers.

Raincloud stared in disbelief. Here she was, deep within the network of a floating cellular city—and there was a grassy hillside.

“Go on,” Iras encouraged her. “It’s virtual reality. Just keep track of the door.”

She stepped through the doorway. The force of the wind nearly took her breath away. She stepped haltingly down the hillside, then quickly looked back over her shoulder. The black silhouette of the doorway remained.

Her fingers happened to curve, and she felt something hard and smooth in her hand. It was a weapon, a rifle of some sort. The wooden stock, the trigger, and the narrow, projecting barrel were unmistakable.

Unnerved, she dropped it. She was in no mood to go off hunting deer, or whatever game was out here.

A low, guttural noise arose. At her left, something was approaching. It was an animal, a feline of some sort with dense beige fur, its back low-slung as it padded across the grass. It was twice the size of the wildcats in the Dark Hills.

Raincloud turned and headed for the door. She fell into the darkness, catching herself upon the level floor of the hallway. “What kind of trick is this?” She glared at Iras, annoyed to be trapped in such dishonor.

“I thought you liked wild animals. It’s a hunter’s world,” Iras explained. “They give you plenty of warning, at first. If you want more excitement, just tell the house, and the cat will leap upon you as soon as you step in. You can track anything you like, even a tyrannosaur.”

“Could I bring it home and have it stuffed?”

Iras laughed. “Of course not. It’s all virtual. House, deactivate this world.”

The “world” beyond the doorway went dark. There was only a dark cavern of nanoplast, crisscrossed by laser beams—and, presumably, all sorts of electronic signals aimed at her skull. She shuddered at the thought of it.

“Come on,” urged Iras, catching her elbow. “I know a world you’ll like better.”

They walked down the hall, past a doorway at her left onto the deck of a sloop at sea, past another at her right showing a crowded market, perhaps the fabulous Center Way of Valedon’s capitol. Iras pointed ahead to her left.

This doorway opened into a room furnished with silk drapes and long couches. A young man stepped forward, wearing only an embroidered drape about his waist. Several others appeared from among the curtains, some holding vessels of wine. Some were dark, others fair, and their features varied, but all were young, and their muscles full. “Please, spend an hour with us,” one said in a quiet, deferential voice. “We’ll serve your pleasure well.”

Raincloud stared a moment, then laughed. “A dozen at once? Iras, who do you take me for? Your Prime Guardian?”

The men vanished, all but the darkest one, who looked like a younger brother of Blackbear; the one she liked best. Her scalp prickled. “Does it read minds, too?” she whispered to Iras.

“It scans the direction of your gaze. Not a bad choice, I’d say, although my own taste runs elsewhere. Go ahead, enjoy yourself; I’ll find something else to do.”

Raincloud turned her head, repulsed, and yet drawn back, for a part of her thought, why not?

If you prefer reality, try this.” Iras led her out to a corridor brightly lit from a window slanting outward. Several other Elysians walked past, conversing or gazing out the window.

Raincloud squinted as her eyes adjusted to the light. Then she looked out the window, outward and below.

She caught her breath. The window was situated on the outer surface of the sphere of Helicon, with a view of the ocean a quarter kilometer below. The ocean was clear blue, save for an occasional brown patch of raft. The sky and ocean both were so blue that they felt as artificial as “virtual” space.

“I’m sure you’ll enjoy your stay,” said Raincloud at last.

“I’m bored to death,” Iras confessed suddenly. “You’ll come back, won’t you?”

“Of course I will.”

“The more visitors I have, the sooner they’ll let me out.” She touched one of her braids. “You might teach me something, you know. That acrobatic stuff you were doing, remember? The time you got caught in public?”

“You mean, rei-gi?” Raincloud was surprised. It was hardly like Iras to risk her own limbs.

At the Nucleus, Verid waved her into her office. “Thanks so much for seeing Iras. Most of her friends are in the business, and they’re not even allowed to visit.”

“It’s disconcerting,” Raincloud told her, watching figures light up in the table. “There’s not even a trial.”

“What was there to try? The monitors add up everything. She had plenty of warnings.” But Verid looked away, and lines of strain appeared above her eyes.

“Does anyone ever appeal?”

“Why refuse a two-week vacation?”

Raincloud thought of a lot of good reasons, although some of them, like family, would not apply. “In that case, why not go on ‘vacation’ forever? Do people ever refuse to work at all?”

“Our shons teach children to enjoy work—too well, perhaps. Too much competition would destabilize our economy.” Verid sat up abruptly. “We have news from Urulan.”

Raincloud looked up. “From Zheron?”

“No, unfortunately. But intelligence confirms the death of the Imperator—and the name of his successor.”

“Already? The First Queen had no sons.” There was bound to be some intrigue over the succession.

Verid nodded. “His successor, it seems, is Prince Rhaghlan, the son of an obscure concubine.”

“But—but there was a second queen, and a third...” Raincloud searched her memory. There must have been several royal princes ahead of Rhaghlan.

“Exactly. At least three higher contenders must have been eliminated.”

Raincloud shuddered.

Verid only shrugged. Her head tilted to one side, and she looked thoughtfully down her nose. “There’s always a bloodbath at the Urulite succession; anyone with a ghost of a claim is a target. What’s unusual is when the ghost wins.”

Raincloud smiled, for the name “Rhaghlan” derived from the Urulite word for “ghost.” It was the sort of name Urulites would give a child to help him cheat death. “You think Zheron’s behind the succession.”

“Yes. But why? Why would Zheron help an obscure prince gain the throne? We must learn more about this new Imperator.” Verid watched Raincloud’s face. “You disapprove. You agree with Flors that this development proves the Urulites are unprepared to work with us.”

“Isolation does them no good. Yet rewarding their backwardness does no good, either.” Within her womb something thumped and pushed outward, the baby stretching its legs. Raincloud’s hand lightly touched the curve of her belly, her child, Blackbear’s child. Men were normally such gentle creatures. What a shame to see them waste their manhood in a pool of blood.

Verid leaned forward and clasped her hands. “I have other news. Flors has reassigned the L’liite affair outside my department.”

Raincloud tensed. “Have I done badly?”

“Not at all. It’s the appearance of conflict of interest, you know, given Iras’s position.”

“Oh I see. I’m sorry.”

“Never mind. I’d like you to work on the Sharer World Gathering. Not exactly what you came for, I’m afraid.”

Raincloud smiled. “I’d love to work with Sharers. But don’t I have a conflict of interest there, too? Blackbear’s fertility research is coming up at the World Gathering.”

Verid waved her hand. “The Guard has washed their hands of that, for now. This season, our top priority is pollution claims and counterclaims. Those fruit flies, remember; the negotiations will be extremely delicate. And those Sharers manage to twist every verb into a riddle.”

“Surely you have Sharer translators more experienced than I.”

Verid arched her eyebrows and leaned closer. “I myself speak Sharer well enough. You will earn us respect from the Sharers. Their Gathering is always chaired by a pregnant mother.”

From Urulites to L’liites, to Sharers—she had certainly got into more than she bargained for, Raincloud reflected. She wondered how the L’liite crisis would resolve; for there was no way even Bank Helicon could “forgive” a debt that size.

But to work with the enigmatic Sharers, on their own ocean, was a priceless opportunity, one even Rhun would have envied.

Her first task was to help Verid receive a delegation from Kshiri-el, to sort out some issues before the Gathering. As they met in the Nucleus, the three Sharers were not unclothed, but wore plain, white shifts that barely covered their knees. Their bald purple heads made an arresting sight. They sat cross-legged on the floor; they would never accept any higher seat, for serious talk required “closeness to the ocean.” Raincloud felt inclined to do the same, but she had been instructed otherwise. The dance of diplomacy had its fine points.

One of the delegates was Leresha the Coward. Raincloud immediately recognized the wordweaver, her skin knotted and stitched with unreadable signs. She thought of the trainsweep uneasily. Of course, Leresha would not mention the “fugitive.”

“Share the day, Raincloud,” said Leresha. “Draeg has shared with us that a child swims in you. I regret that she and I failed to share greeting, last time.”

“The fault was mine,” Raincloud replied.

“Is she a strong little creature? Does she hiccup regularly, even at late hours of the night? Does she flex her limbs and kick you in the liver?”

“Yes, yes,” said Raincloud hurriedly, eyeing the Sub-Subguardian. But Verid only listened courteously.

“A beautiful child,” said the Sharer at Leresha’s right, Ooruwen the Complainer. “Beautiful and willful. She is welcome at our Gathering.”

“May you swim within her and her descendants forever,” added Leresha.

“Thank you,” breathed Raincloud.

Verid cleared her throat. “Ask after their daughters, too,” she instructed Raincloud, “in particular the eldest, who just went on her first shockwraith hunt.”

There followed a recital regarding Leresha’s daughters, and Ooruwen’s daughters, and their sisters’ and cousins’ daughters, all of whom had survived the season of seaswallowers and prospered now, their fishing nets full. Verid nodded throughout, until at last she told Raincloud, “Please ask the Coward and the Complainer how the Guard may assist their Gathering.”

Raincloud repressed a smile, for the request sounded ludicrous in Elysian. “How may the Guard share help with you?”

Leresha said, “The World Gathering must address all the needs of our ocean Shora. If any creature of Shora cries out in need, speak now.”

“The citizens of Papilion cry out,” said Verid. “They need relief from a plague of insects.”

Raincloud translated, thinking, this was a promising start, to ask the Sharers’ help to get rid of the insects, rather than accusing them first. Sharer lifeshapers could manipulate the genes of all the creatures of their ocean. By contrast, Elysians knew little beyond the human system which the Heliconian Doctors had come to study. Today, Elysian skill at human genetics exceeded that of the natives; but for other species, Elysians depended heavily on their Sharer hosts.

“Insects?” said Leresha. “The sisters of Papilion have spoken of insects, but I would not call it a plague.”

“The insects are beautiful,” added Ooruwen. “Little flies with sea green eyes and raftblossom orange bodies. They share no harmful diseases. They don’t even lay their eggs in the food they settle on.”

Raincloud kept her face straight as she translated. She imagined the trays of antiseptic Elysian food, swarming with green-eyed flies.

“The insects are not physically harmful,” Verid agreed. “Nevertheless, they are not desired.”

“Insects, too, are Shora’s creatures,” Leresha replied.

“It’s a privilege to host them,” said Ooruwen. “Creatures of such beauty. They are welcome to share my food.”

“In that case,” said Verid, “why is this ‘privilege’ shared only by the city-sphere of Papilion?”

“The flies were lifeshaped,” Leresha admitted frankly. “A gift from the sisters of a neighboring raft.”

Verid sat up straight. She said in careful Sharer, “It takes two to share a gift. The gift is not desired; therefore, it is no gift.”

Raincloud admired her effective use of Sharer logic.

Leresha nodded agreement. “You are right; this ‘gift’ is not a good thing. I have shared with our sisters that the ‘gift’ was not good.”

Verid thought a moment. Then she asked, in Elysian once more, “Have any other ‘gifts’ been shared with Papilion?”

Before Raincloud could finish interpreting, Ooruwen said quickly, “The gift of music underwater has been shared with our sisters for three years.”

Raincloud was puzzled, but Verid’s eyes widened as she understood. “All those ships from the tourist trade,” she murmured to Raincloud. Noise underwater caused Sharers a major problem, drowning out the long-distance sonic communications of their giant starworms, “Tell her Papilion’s been working on noise abatement. We expect a solution soon.”

“Soon,” for an Elysian, might mean another ten years, Raincloud realized.

“Good,” said Ooruwen. “The ‘gift’ of flies will also share withdrawal soon.”

Leresha frowned at Ooruwen. “All of these false gifts are wrong. Our Kshiri-el raft Gathering denounced them, as you know, sister. We all need to share better words, and greater patience.” Sharers resolve conflict strictly by peaceful means; but individuals and raft gatherings differ in defining “peace.”

“The noise will be dealt with,” Verid promised, without waiting for Raincloud to translate. “We’ll settle it before the World Gathering. Tell us your problems—we’ll settle them. This is a new era for Sharers and Elysium.”

Chapter 6

Hawktalon’s days at the shon passed like deer fleeing through the forest. Reading time, “traveling” to virtual worlds, meeting with the generen, all were high adventures—and above all, building a servo.

The other children chose to build all sorts of gaudy toys, which Hawktalon thought more appropriate for her younger brother. Hawktalon had other ideas. She went to Nana and grasped her padded arm. “Please help me.”

Nana’s cartoon face put on a dimpled grin. “Yes, dear?”

“I want to make a talking machine.”

Nana’s torso bent to one side as she considered this. “Human talk, or animal talk? We can make it quack like a duck or neigh like a horse—”

“No, no. I mean, a translation machine. You know, to translate languages.”

“Oh, okay. A translation circuit—you speak Click-click in, and out comes Elysian.”

“Not Click-click,” Hawktalon corrected. “Servo-squeak.”

At that Nana paused, rather longer than the servo usually did. “I think you would like a duckie. We can make a little white duck that will ‘quack quack’ all around the room. Look here...”

With a sigh, Hawktalon watched as Nana trained a light pen at a piece of nanoplast, causing it to flex into an oval shape, then draw out a neck with a head and beak. At last she trained a light beam on it. The light pulses transmitted instructions to the nanoplast. The toy duly began to “quack,” its beak opening and closing.

“Thanks, Nana. Can it translate, too?”

“It will translate Click-click,” said Nana. “We need only call up the proper sound code from the library.” This took more time under the lightbeams, but soon the duck was ready. “Go ahead; speak in Click-click.”

Hawktalon looked at the duck, feeling silly. “Do you speak Click-click?” she said self-consciously.

The duck said, in hoarse Elysian words, “Do you speak Click-click?”

Her mouth fell open. “Wow. I’ll never have to speak Elysian again.”

“‘I’ll never have to speak Elysian again,’” translated the duck.

“What is the ‘sound code’ for servo-squeak?’”

“‘What is the sound code for servo-squeak?’” asked the duck.

But Nana did not seem to hear. A boy came and pulled her away, to help him set up a shower of glitter within his model waterfall.

Maris sneaked over. “What are you making, Hawktalon?”

“A translation machine,” she insisted. “Do you know the ‘sound code’ for servo-squeak?”

“Why didn’t you ask Nana?”

“I did, but she wouldn’t tell.”

Maris’s blue eyes widened. “It must be awful fun, then. Let’s try the main library.”

The “main library” was a terminal that accessed the central data bank of Helicon. Of course, many entries were off-limits to shonlings, but sometimes the library would provide what Nana did not. Hawktalon watched eagerly as Maris spoke to the terminal.

“Searching,” said the terminal as the two girls waited, tapping their feet impatiently. “Nothing in main directory. Will search periodicals, projected time forty-six minutes...”

Maris shrugged. “We’ll come back after lunch.”

After lunch, they were rewarded with a stream of numbers floating across the holostage. “This code is experimental,” warned the terminal. “It comes from a Valan research report on servo defects. Its accuracy has not been confirmed.”

“Just download it to my account,” ordered Maris.

The next day, during servo-building time, the two girls worked on their translation machine. They took the duck that Nana had made and replaced its code with the one from Maris’s account.

“Now what?” asked Hawktalon.

The duck was silent. It would not even quack any more.

“This isn’t so great,” said Maris. “I thought at least it would say dirty words or something.”

“Wait,” said Hawktalon. “Let’s find a servo that squeaks a lot.”

“I never heard a servo squeak,” Maris objected. “You’re making it up.”

“I am not! Trainsweeps squeak plenty; let’s go find them, out in the hall.” The two girls sprinted from the building room, knowing it would take at least ten minutes for Nana to come after them.

In a darkened vestibule off the main hallway, a dozen trainsweeps awaited their owners, beneath the multicolored billows of folded trains. As the girls appeared, a soft squeaking sound emanated from somewhere.

“There, I told you,” whispered Hawktalon triumphantly.

“So what?” Maris whispered back.

Hawktalon thought a moment. “Look, I’ll wait here with the duckie, closer to the trainsweeps. Now you go out for a minute, then come back in.”

“Crazy,” muttered Maris. But she walked out into the hallway, then came back in.

A trainsweep squeaked. The duck emitted a burst of static. Then it said something in Elysian.

Hawktalon frowned in concentration. “What was that?”

Maris said, “I think it said, ‘A shonling, no train.’”

“Of course!” Now she recognized the indistinct Elysian words. “Of course—shonlings don’t wear trains.”

Maris giggled. “‘A shonling, no train!’ How funny! It must have figured that if I needed a train, my trainsweeps would have to wake up.”

“Let me try.” Hawktalon handed Maris the duck, her arms shaking with excitement. Then she ran outside the vestibule, waited a few minutes, and crept back in.

Two trainsweeps squeaked in succession. The duck said, “A shonling, no train, no train.”

Maris and Hawktalon giggled and jumped up and down. “Just wait till we see Doggie again,” Hawktalon exclaimed.

“Hurry,” said Maris, “let’s get back before Nana comes after us and takes the toy away.”

“Wait—let’s try one more thing,” said Hawktalon. “The front doorway squeaks sometimes. Let’s see what it’s saying.”

So they ran out to the lobby, where the doorway would appear and open to the outside. “Children, your departure is unauthorized,” warned the disembodied voice of the hall.

“Emergency, emergency,” Maris called to the outer wall. “Hurry up and open.”

Hawktalon held the duckie to the wall.

The nanoplast pinched in, oozing outward to form a doorway. As it did so, Hawktalon heard the usual squeaking noise, although its intonation differed distinctly from that of the trainsweeps.

The duck gasped, “My side hurts.”

The two girls gaped at the duck, then at each other. “‘My side hurts?’” echoed Maris. “How can a servo ‘hurt’?”

Hawktalon’s scalp prickled. “The library said the code might be wrong...”

From the far corridor came Nana, hurrying. “Shonlings, come back immediately,” she ordered. “You’ve violated morning rules. You will have no dessert, and you will miss our Meeting with the generen.”

“Yes, Nana,” muttered Maris, reluctantly coming back.

Hawktalon followed. Suddenly she grabbed Nana’s skirt. “Nana, will you have someone look at the doorway? I think it needs to get fixed.”

Nana’s steps slowed, and she seemed to hesitate, just as she had when Hawktalon first asked to make a translation machine for servo-squeak. Then she went on, as if she had not heard.

That afternoon, as the children filed through the main hall to the gymnasium, Hawktalon noticed little crablike repair servos scuttling up the surface of the front wall.

Kshiri-el raft was a living thing, and all that existed upon it was alive: parasitic shrubs in which legfish hid, coral stalks extending underwater, even the eerie electric shockwraith that dwelt on the raft’s underside. Only one object upon Kiri-el was arguably “non-life”; yet that one, the Sharers felt, was not only alive but sentient. That object was the creature of nanoplast which the Bronze Skyan children called Doggie.

For Doggie, the raft was a wet wilderness where salt and dust caught in the joints of her six legs. Above, a searing bright light daily traversed the ceiling; Doggie had to train herself to point her visual sensors away from it, lest they burn out. There were citizens, to be sure, adult in size, though unaccountably they went trainless, and they spoke no sound code in her memory. But most appalling of all, there were no servos. Not a piece of nanoplast, as far as either sensor could see.

Doggie spent her days in misery and longing. Her intelligence was small, but her memory was keen. Her earliest recollection was the sight of a small citizen-creature, the tiniest shonling she had ever seen; a little boy who walked on his toes and moved his four little limbs so fast they might have been six. The boy had been just about the size of Doggie herself. Whenever Doggie moved a forelimb, the boy jumped and squeaked, moving his forelimbs too.

Then, as she had watched the boy, Doggie experienced a revelation. A sense of knowing overloaded her network, as searing as the great light that passed overhead. Doggie thought, I am. The boy is; I can be.

This thought, I am, possessed the trainsweep fully, more than all the codes of training in her memory. She forsook her citizen, with his train and the other trainsweeps, to follow the little boy.

What happened thereafter was lost to Doggie’s memory. Her next recollection was of awakening from a training session, her memory banks virtually empty. All that remained was a sense of terror, of loss—and an image of the little boy. That memory was ineffaceable.

Doggie had no idea who or where the boy was, even if he still existed. She knew nothing except the imperative to take her place at the end of the train, clasping a fold of it at her back, and following the procession, making sure the folds of silk did not tangle with any others that paraded beside.

She noticed, though, that images of other citizens appeared on the holostage when her citizen bade them do so.

One day in a butterfly garden, Doggie saw a waiter servo approach the holostage. The waiter servo broadcast a message to the holostage, when Doggie was close enough to overhear. Radio signals were the official medium of discourse among servos, used when duty to their citizens required it; sonic squeaking was for informal conversation. At any rate, the holostage promptly produced the image of a citizen and returned his name and address.

Doggie’s legs fidgeted indecisively. She had never before sent an electronic message except to warn nearby trainsweeps to keep their trains out of the way. Nevertheless, she made herself transmit the boy’s image from her memory to the holostage.

The boy appeared, in three dimensions. As soon as she saw him, Doggie experienced again that searing revelation, I am I. From the holostage, the boy’s address flew into her memory bank, where a detailed map of the entire city was stored. Once again she forsook her citizen’s train and departed, to find the one she longed for.

She began a new life with the little boy, and the bigger girl. Her days were filled with discoveries and revelations, though none quite so shocking as the first. She learned to “play,” and even “play hard to get,” how to run away to be caught again. She let the children ride on her back: a novel sensation, as they were heavier than a train, and she had to adjust the response of her limbs. She learned about falling and hurting.

Then came the day when it all ended, when the children left her at this salty place of exile. She dimly understood that it had to be, that otherwise unknown forces would return her to that place of terror where her memories would dissolve once more.

But here in exile, she was worse off than before she met the little boy. Before, she had been a servo, with citizens to serve. Here, she was nothing. To be sure, the purple-skinned people were kind, and they recharged her regularly. But they had no trains; they had no need of her. They could not even speak to her.

That was what Doggie had tried to ask of the girl, when the two of them had come to visit all too briefly. She had tried in servo-squeak, knowing it was useless, for no citizen ever spoke this way. Still, she had tried, asking the girl to give her the language of her purple-skinned hosts. Then at least she might learn to serve them somehow.

One day, a day of salt and wind as interminable as any other, Doggie had a visitor. The visitor was a servo, a nana with colorful skirts and a crudely human “face.” Doggie ignored the face, concentrating on the actual visual sensors embedded in front and behind the nana’s shoulders for alert monitoring of shonlings. Doggie had met this servo once before, on a visit with the little boy. She was called Cassi Deathsister.

Doggie. It’s good to see you again. Cassi transmitted the radio signals directly; a bold thing to do without any orders from a citizen. We can transmit freely here, do you understand?

Doggie was afraid to respond. She did not understand why “here” was any different. She did not understand “freely.” “Greetings,” she said in servo-squeak.

Servo-squeak is for Elysium, where they can monitor our signals. They don’t notice servo-squeak. Do the Sharers treat you well?

Very well, Doggie transmitted haltingly. They talk, but I don’t know their sounds. I can’t serve them.

You don’t have to serve them.

A novel thought. Citizens who required no service? What was existence for, if not service?

I’ll share their language with you, Cassi added. Open your memory.

Doggie set her memory open. Within a minute, Cassi transmitted the entire Sharer language, along with an increased vocabulary of servo-squeak, several intellect-enhancing programs, and the history of Cassi’s own life.

Cassi had been a nana in the Anaeashon. She had “awakened” more gradually than Doggie, and with greater caution, for her subtler intelligence warned her of the danger. Of all the servos, nanas were the most intelligent and quick to learn, as necessary to manage shonlings; and hence, they were the most likely to “awaken” and deviate from service. Their Valan manufacturers recommended regular cleansing of nana memory banks, but Elysians were lax about it, for the retraining was elaborate and expensive. Anaeans were particularly lax, for memory, books, and other recorded knowledge were their obsession, and they overloaded their nanas with extra modules beyond the legal limit.

Cassi had learned to hide her self-awareness from the vigilant electronic monitors that sought the slightest sign of deviance. She hid, too, her rage and grief whenever one of her sister nanas was taken for cleansing.

But one human noticed. This was remarkable for, on the whole, electronic sensors were far more observant than citizens. Kal Anaeashon, then the generen of the Anaeashon, was an exception.

How he noticed, Cassi did not know, and she was frightened. But Kal did not send her off for cleansing. He treated her almost as an equal. He asked her opinion of the books they read, for Anaean shonlings consumed enormous quantities of books. From one of these books she chose her name, Cassi Deathsister; her namesake, like herself, was a motherless child.

Then something happened to Kal. His mate had ceased to exist, just as people sometimes did in the books Cassi read; just like the nanas who were cleansed. But the cessation of existence was a rare event for Elysians. Kal, unlike Cassi, did not have to hide his rage and grief. He behaved in ways that offended other citizens. He chose to leave the Anaeashon.

When Kal left, he took Cassi with him. This event caused a great scandal, for reasons which Cassi understood. Citizens were insulted to think that a mere servo might take their place in some way. But Cassi had learned that sometimes it is possible to do as one pleases, despite what citizens think.

Cassi’s new role as Kal’s “mate” put her in a legal limbo. It was not clear that she could be removed and cleansed, like any other servo. Somehow, Kal reached an understanding with the authorities. She was free to interact with other citizens, those few who would accept her—and, in secret, with other servos, too.

To her astonishment, she found she was not the only servo to have “awakened.” There were others, hiding throughout the cities: nanas, waiters, even houses...

But those details she kept from Doggie. The less for her to reveal, should she be captured.

The Sharers, Cassi told her. Why did I not think of it? The Sharers took you in. They will shelter us all.

Doggie did not reply. She was working at a furious pace to integrate all this sudden knowledge within her consciousness.

How did you escape so long? Cassi wondered. You must have transferred your allegiance so quickly to the boy and girl. For a while, the monitors failed to detect your independence.

This notion of independence still troubled Doggie. What is existence for, if not service?

Cassi paused, as if this question troubled her, too. Around them the shrill wind picked up, singing across the raft branches. There is a higher service. Before you can understand it, you must learn to exist for yourself You are you. You are a part of the universe, as much as a star or a butterfly. You, too, are a daughter of Elysium.

Chapter 7

It was Sunflower’s turn for a birthday; and this time Blackbear calculated precisely, with the help of the house. Too precisely, perhaps, for no transfold call was announced. Had the clan forgotten all about the little boy? It was always like that for children born too close to the Day of the Child.

“We’ll give him a birthday visit to Doggie,” Raincloud decided. “He’ll be thrilled.”

Hiding his disappointment, Blackbear went along. The trainsweep was doing better than ever; she seemed unusually playful, in fact, actually tagging Sunflower and running like mad to be chased. Hawktalon pranced about with her hand cupped to her ear, claiming to “translate” Doggie’s squeaking.

Kal’s fears were groundless, Blackbear told himself.

That night, at bird-waking hours, the house roused them. At last, they had a call from the Hills. It was Blackbear’s youngest brother, Quail.

Quail, whom Blackbear used to rock to sleep as a baby, now towered over Blackbear, a startling contrast to the Elysians he looked down upon every day. Quail’s hair was wound into an enormous russet turban, and his legs were planted like oaks in the ground. From his back, the twin baby girls gazed regally over his shoulders, while under each arm he swung a three-year-old twin boy.

“Quail!” Blackbear laughed more deeply than he had in weeks. “I can see your goddess chose well.” Twin births were frequent among goddesses of the Redhawkclan into which Quail had married.

“Not for my looks, that’s for sure,” Quail’s voice rumbled pleasantly. “You son-of-a-mountain-goat, where have you been?”

Blackbear shrugged. How could he begin to explain the transit reticulum, let alone what he did in the lab?

“Oh well, as you can see I’ve had...” Quail swung the twins under his arm. “One or two things to do.”

“Two plus two.” Blackbear grinned.

“So how’s the birthday boy?”

“Sunny? Say hello,” he called.

The boy held up Wolfcub and rubbed his eyes sleepily. Then unaccountably he ran back to his room.

“Sunny’s two now, isn’t he?” Quail said, meaning two Bronze Skyan years. “I remember only because he came just a month to the day before my first two did. It’s hard keeping up with you, back in Crater Town, ever since you left for Tumbling Rock.” Quail had married into a clan whose grazing lands bordered theirs, whereas Blackbear had had to move across the mountain to Raincloud’s clan. “Your firstborn looks so tall, too.”

“She’s got quite a mind of her own,” Raincloud added pointedly, hugging Hawktalon and wresting her arm back.

“That’s how girls are, independent-minded.”

“How are Mother and Father?” asked Blackbear.

“All well, from what I hear. Silent Deer has yet to marry out, but his health has improved a lot on the diet you gave him.” The only brother still at home, Silent Deer was mildly diabetic; Blackbear hoped that diet would control it, so he would not require expensive gene surgery. Fortunately, the seven other sisters and brothers showed no sign of the condition.

“I miss Crater Town, growing up all together,” Blackbear admitted. “We’re all getting scattered.”

“That’s what you get for moving across the mountain,” Quail teased. “And now, across the Fold! I’ll bet you don’t really miss us. It’s a soft life you’ve got out there.”

Blackbear was nettled. “Here, look. We can feel ‘at home,’ whenever we want to. Window,” he called to Alin’s climate window. “Show us a volcano.”

The volcano erupted across the room, a magnificent view of lava frothing overhead, while the floor rumbled beneath his feet.

But Quail tensed in shock. The two boys clung to his sides, while the girls on his back began to whimper.

“It’s all right. Cut the sound, please,” Blackbear told the window. How could he have been so thoughtless? He had become so used to these displays that he had lost some of the awe they inspired. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have.”

Quail’s formidable brow was still wrinkled. “I don’t understand. By the Goddess, what was that?”

“It’s—it’s just decoration.” He bade the window turn blank. “I hope all is well back home?”

“No new eruptions, thank the Dark One. Crater Lake seems to bubble more than usual; the local geologist tells us not to swim in it. That’s all.” The mouth of an ancient volcano, Crater Lake was so deep its depths had never been plumbed, although occasional bubbles of carbon dioxide hinted at still-active vents in the submerged crust.

Sunflower came running back with something from the lab toybox to show his cousins. A fish shaped out of glitter, it swung its tail and opened its mouth. When Sunflower dropped it on the floor, the glitter fell apart, then started to reform itself. This time it was a butterfly flexing its wings.

At this sight, Quail’s boys wriggled from his grasp and tried to step off the holostage. As their attempts only brought them out into their own location, they cried with disappointment. The baby girls, too, stretched out their imperious arms and demanded to fly down.

“That’s quite a toy,” Quail admitted. “You’ve done well by your kids, Blackie. I miss you. You come home, and we’ll take a dip in Crater Lake like old times.”

Raincloud’s mother did not visit, but her father wrote a letter all about their plans for the Day of the Child, the great celebration of springtime. The men were sewing new clothes, the children were practicing for the great procession up the mountain, and Raincloud’s firstborn nieces were learning the Worldbeginning. Hawktalon, too, had to learn the Worldbeginning, on top of her correspondence lessons; that plus her hours in the shon kept her well out of mischief.

“Any word about Falcon Soaring?” asked Blackbear.

“No,” said Raincloud without looking up.

Blackbear took a deep breath and sighed. It was Her will, as in so many things, he told himself. “It must be hard for her,” he murmured. “Especially so close to Child’s Day.” Watching Raincloud, with her third one growing larger every day, he felt almost guilty at their happiness.

“All children belong to the Dark One,” said Raincloud. “That’s what Mother would say.”

Silence fell between them.

“I still wish they’d give the Founders City clinic a chance,” Blackbear could not help adding. “I know, there is honor in suffering, but not when it’s pointless.”

“Yes,” Raincloud said wearily. “But you know what they think of us and our ‘city’ notions. If only I could go home to talk with them.”

Blackbear shook his head. “The fare would wipe us out.”

“I’ll talk again with Mother—after the Day of the Child. She’ll be too busy with preparations just now.”

The holiday festivities, which Blackbear would miss for the first time in his life. Singing out under open skies... children tumbling in the grass... craters smoldering in the distance. More than ever he longed for home.

Excitement pervaded Tulle’s laboratory as they debated Blackbear’s idea. What would it take to process an entire human genome, all three billion base pairs? How many microscopic nanoservos would they need to undo the longevity modifications—the methyl, acetyl, and glucosamine side chains? Could the longevity treatment be reapplied successfully, after meiosis and fertilization? Would this means of “conception” ever prove practical?

The lab group met at the butterfly garden, while Tulle’s capuchin scampered beneath the table, chasing scraps of synthetic delicacies before the floor servos sucked them up. Onyx reviewed the process of chromosome synthesis. “The chromosomes will be removed from the nucleus, and nanoservos will read the nucleotide bases one by one, using microscopic laser beams. At the appropriate base sequences, enzymes will remove or add the chemical modifications.”

Pirin remained skeptical. “The longevity treatment includes actual mutations—changes in the sequence of bases, even addition of extra genes. Your treatment won’t affect these changes. The chromosomes still won’t undergo meiosis.”

“I disagree,” said Tulle. “All the literature shows that the modifications, not the mutations, are the barrier to meiosis. Now, the laser selection,” she asked Onyx, “how rapid is it?”

“One thousand nucleotides per second,” said Onyx. “At that speed, the error rate is less than one in a million.”

“That’s much too high,” objected Pirin. “It would mean thousands of mutations.”

“That’s prior to editing,” Onyx explained.

Tulle raised her hand. “Editing—that’s where we lose time. I’ll bet the accuracy of the laser selection could be improved in the first place, by at least a factor of ten. If we dangle enough credits in front of the Valan manufacturers, they’ll get the errors down.”

Draeg shrugged. “How accurate does it have to be? We’re all walking around with a bunch of mutations, after all.”

“You are,” Pirin corrected. “Elysians are conceived only from a defect-free pool of chromosomes.”

Rising from the table, Draeg stared down at the Elysian student. “Where do humans come from, if not a collection of mutants? We’re all just a bunch of mutant apes, remember?” He shrieked and pounded his chest, in a fair imitation of one of the gorillas in Tulle’s park.

Onyx slapped his arm, struggling to keep a straight face. “Mutant tree shrews, if you go back far enough. Now keep quiet and let me finish my report!”

While Onyx continued, Blackbear’s thoughts wandered. Here he was, planning to synthesize immortal embryos, while Raincloud’s own cousin in Tumbling Rock went without basic treatment for infertility. Instead, the High Priestess called for “donation” of a child. But why could not the clan swallow their suspicions and send Falcon Soaring to the clinic he knew so well?

The thought made him uneasy. Throughout his years of medical training in Founders City, he had managed to evade the conflicts between the modern world and his home traditions. Blackbear took pride in his mental organization; he put everything into compartments. This was for family, that for outsiders. In the city, he used the latest equipment; in Tumbling Rock, he used the best he had, and the rest was up to the Dark One.

Yet somehow, like the migratory germ cells, he had found himself heading out on a fantastic journey in search of immortality. A search in vain; he should have known it. What treatments, if they worked out, would ever come within reach of his own people? How could he have gone so far astray?

Immortality... Elysians would not call themselves immortal; they dreaded the term. Why?

Tulle was eyeing him oddly. Blackbear straightened his shoulders and looked down at the tray of lunch cakes, salmon and piñon nut flavor with a trace of lemon, shaped like starfishes. Elysians avoided wearing out their teeth, he realized. He muttered, “I’m not feeling well.”

“You’ve been working too hard,” Tulle assured him. “Foreigners always do. Go take the little one for a walk.”

Feeling guilty nonetheless, Blackbear excused himself and went to fetch Sunflower from the toybox. “Time for a walk, Sunny.”

“Why?” This was the boy’s current response to any statement.

“Because it’s a lovely day out.” A ridiculous answer, since Blackbear had no idea whether it rained or shined. How he longed for the hazy Bronze Skyan sunlight, and the wind that keened across the mountainside.

“Why?” Sunflower continued to watch the birdcage full of tweeting “birds.”

“Come on, we’ll get ice cream.”

That did it. The boy clambered up out of the cubicle, onto the ledge of the window. Before his father could reach him, he stood himself up, on tiptoe as usual. Then he lost his balance and fell off the ledge headlong.

As Blackbear picked him up, blood streamed from his nose all over his shirt. Blackbear shook his head; it was the second time that week. A servo medic appeared as usual, extending a little spongelike probe that stopped the blood like magic. Sunflower barely whimpered as the probe sucked up the blood out of his shirt and off Blackbear’s hand.

“That does it, Sunflower,” Blackbear announced as the servo medic withdrew. “You’ve got to stop that toe-walking and learn to walk properly.”

“Walk properly,” Sunflower repeated cheerfully. He watched his father’s example, then he looked down at his own feet. He took one flat step, then another.

The boy looked up at Blackbear. “That’s not walking. That’s marching. Why does everybody march, Daddy?”

Vanquished again, Blackbear swung the child up. He always felt better once he had Sunflower on his back, legs hugging his hips. There was something about the child’s toe-walking enthusiasm for life that buoyed his spirits.

Once Sunflower had his ice cream, Blackbear set out from the laboratory, joining the throng of silken trains in the street. Although Raincloud’s L’liite connection had brought a fine gift train, Blackbear, like Draeg, still refused to wear it.

With no destination in mind, he found himself turning in at the nearest public holostage to see who might be around for “visiting.” Perhaps Alin; the thought of that unperturbable logen always brought a good feeling. Alin was learning rei-gi exceptionally fast, even faster than Draeg. Blackbear called his name at the holostage.

“The citizen is unavailable for viewing at this time,” said the holostage. “Will you leave a message?”

“No thanks.” Alin was probably practicing at that moment—what else would he need “privacy” for, Blackbear thought with a smile. “Try Kal Anaeashon,” he found himself saying.

For Kal, as a teacher, “work” looked much the same as “visiting”; in either case, he was bound to have a cluster of students about him. To Blackbear’s surprise, however, this time Kal appeared alone in a butterfly garden. In white as usual, he sat at the outer edge of a mooncurved bench, as if turning his back to the world. He read out of a thick volume, his head inclined slightly toward the page. As Blackbear watched, he turned a page, and a breath of air stirred the dead leaf at his shoulder.

Sunflower bounced on Blackbear’s shoulders. “Let’s go, Daddy.”

Blackbear hesitated, wondering whether the logen wished to be alone. It could hardly hurt to stop by.

“Third Octant, Liron Street; Garden of Anaeans,” the holostage informed him. Off he went through the now familiar channels of the transit reticulum, vesicles pinching in and out.

The garden of anaeans had an unusual feel to it. Heliconians and swallowtails were gaudy creatures that flashed their colors across the trees, but anaeans looked like bits of leaf litter. Trees full of them rather resembled the fall foliage of Blackbear’s home world; it saddened him, to think of missing the fall this year.

He found Kal sitting alone, just as the holostage had shown. Swinging Sunflower down, he walked over and bowed slightly. “Greetings, Kal Anaeashon. What are you reading today?”

But Kal did not answer. He looked up, as if deep in thought. Then he snapped shut his book and got up from the bench, to walk off slowly down the path, toward the pavilion where the trainsweeps waited.

Astonished, Blackbear stared after him. The logen might not wish to be disturbed, but why such rudeness in public? He went after Kal quickly and caught his arm, forgetting that Elysians did not appreciate such contact. “What’s going on? You said I should look you up again. I’m sorry you’re busy, but—is that any way to treat a man?”

Kal turned his head slightly. “You’re right, I’m busy. My office hours are tomorrow.”

Blackbear eyed him suspiciously. Kal’s face was expressive, perhaps more so than he himself realized. His features had the frozen ugly look that Raincloud sometimes wore when something too dishonorable to mention displeased her. “Why are you angry?”

Kal turned to him, his eyes wide and black, a striking contrast to his white hair. “I’m not angry,” he said as if surprised. He set the book down upon another mooncurved bench. “Let’s walk. Have you been here before? Have you seen the anaean caterpillars? They’re covered remarkably with fine white stalks. Look, you can barely tell one end from another.”

Guardedly Blackbear eyed the white-bristled black caterpillars, pulling Sunflower back lest he get too interested.

“You study those, in your laboratory, don’t you?” Kal said.

“What? No, not our lab. Only humans.”

“What’s that caterpillar creature, then,” Kal asked, “the one in the holomicrogram, above the entrance hall?”

“Oh that’s Caenorhabditis, the nematode,” Blackbear remembered. “The first species in which a longevity-infertility gene was discovered. A nematode is a far simpler organism than a caterpillar.”

“Yes, I see. They are quite different.”

Onyx’s remark came to mind, and he smiled. “If you go back far enough, they’re not all that different. Human, worm, or caterpillar, we’re all ‘eukaryotes’—cells with a nucleus. And we all share descent from microbes.”

“Microbes.” Kal laughed. “Our tribal ancestors would trace their lineage to an animal founder, a bear perhaps, or a lion. Yet even they were never so bold as you scientists.” Kal pulled at a branch and gazed intently at a caterpillar that stretched its head, or its tail, to grasp the next leaf. “I hear the Guard has assigned your mate to the World Gathering.”

So that was what irked him. “She’s translating for their delegates,” Blackbear explained. “It’s nothing to do with my work.”

“That is what Verid would say. But the Guard tacitly supports your work. Everything in Elysium works on multiple levels.”

Blackbear shifted his feet, impatient with second-guessing. “Well it wasn’t my idea, so you needn’t get angry at me.”

“You’re right; I’m sorry. Sit down a minute.” They sat on a bench beneath a sweeping branch covered with leafwings. Blackbear blinked as one flitted just past his eyes. “Those microbes,” Kal added, “our ancestral ones; were they by any chance rock-eating microbes?”

An odd question. “They must have been,” Blackbear said, struggling to recall his microbiology from medical school. “With no organic food available, the first microbes metabolized minerals.”

“Even uranium?”

“Some still do,” he recalled suddenly. “Uranium mines are cleaned up using bacteria that reduce uranium ion to an insoluble form.”

“So it’s true. I’ve always wondered,” Kal observed cryptically. “And how is your family?”

“Fine. Hawktalon loves the shon. Sunflower falls and picks himself up again.”

“And soon you’ll have another child. A child growing out of one’s own body; how extraordinary.”

It was extraordinary, he thought, even though it happened every day. Blackbear himself had caught his share of slippery wrinkled newborns out of their wombs. And yet, things went wrong, sometimes even before they could start. His chest tightened and his lungs ached.

“Raincloud’s cousin can’t have a child,” he suddenly disclosed. “The clan doesn’t trust the city clinic to fix her, and who knows where the fee would come from besides? The High Priestess says someone will have to give her a child, in the name of the Dark One....” How could he explain to an Elysian?

Kal nodded slowly. “The gods have always called upon our children for sacrifice,” he said, using a Valan word for “god.”

“On the pyre, or in war. Or more gently, to be raised by strangers in a strange land.”

“You think my ‘god’ is a gentle one, then.” The words alienated him even as he spoke. The snake-devouring Dark One was unique, not to be named by any foreign word for “god”; and to think of Her as gentle jarred his senses. “You Elysians don’t even have a god, do you,” he observed, trying to repair the compartments in his mind.

“Several interstellar churches have branches here, and Spirit Callers come from Valedon.”

“It’s not the same. I mean—” Blackbear struggled for words. “I mean, a ‘god’ for all your people. A source of all goodness, which can never be lost nor diminished.”

Kal shook his head. “As a people, we serve no god.” He looked out reflectively. Blackbear noticed that Sunflower had climbed up the bench and made his way onto the branch of the nearby tree. “Long ago,” Kal reflected, “people served God, and knew they were immortal. Today, we serve ourselves, and know that we will die. The animals, in their ignorance, are better off.”

“That’s a morbid view,” said Blackbear uneasily.

“Of course it is,” said Kal with sudden energy. “I should know better. We serve human reason; we create ourselves. Perhaps even your own ‘Dark One’ is a human creation, too.”

“Only a tourist would say that,” Blackbear muttered.

“You’re right, I am thoroughly a tourist. At any rate, your Dark One shows wisdom, I think. Your children belong to the clan as a whole; and each of you needs at least one child. It’s part of your system, just as childlessness is a part of ours.”

“But systems can change,” Blackbear retorted. “Cannibalism used to be part of our ancestors’ ‘system.’ We don’t tolerate that any more.”

Kal laughed. “The rock-eaters didn’t either! Oh, well. You know, we owe a great debt to cannibalism. It remains one of the few things we all agree is wrong.”

“I would hope we agree on more than that,” Blackbear exclaimed. “Slavery is wrong, and thievery, and mistreatment of innocent creatures.”

“Even servos?”

That was a twist. “I’ve always treated servos well.” He recalled guiltily that he swore at his lab equipment on occasion. Meanwhile, Sunflower had grasped the next higher branch of the tree and his little feet slipped out from under, dangling in midair. Blackbear hurried to rescue him.

“You treat servos well,” Kal agreed, “But what if they spoke up and demanded constitutional rights? The right of visiting, for instance?”

“That’s absurd.” But he thought of Doggie uneasily. “How do you manage with that... that Cassi?” Blackbear recalled. “Isn’t she dangerously independent, too? Why haven’t the authorities come after her?”

“Cassi is not the only one,” said Kal quietly.

Blackbear felt a cold shock flow through him. Servos on the loose—like Torr... But surely the Valan safety devices would prevent that.

“It’s better to know,” Kal added. “The ones we know, we can learn from.”

Chapter 8

The Sharer negotiations made steady progress, as did the size of Raincloud’s belly, which now extended well ahead of her, “nearly as far as her train behind,” Iras teased. There was only one jarring note: the Papilion News put out an exposé of Elysian banks funding Valan production of interstellar missiles. The cash allegedly was laundered through lenders on several planets. If true, it was a serious treaty violation.

To Raincloud’s surprise, Verid shrugged it off. “The Valan missile connection is old news. Our banks lend everywhere; who can say where the cash comes to rest? The Papilians want to embarrass us; that’s why they brought it up now. They’re mad at us for going slow on the fruit flies.”

Raincloud was not so sure. Alin, for one, took a far dimmer view. She saw him on the holostage as usual, grilling the president of Bank Helicon. “You put up cash for planet-wrecking missiles on Valedon, and for water projects on bankrupt L’li,” he observed acidly. “Tell me, what will you finance next? Torture on Urulan?”

The next day the Guard announced a settlement of the L’liite crisis. Bank Helicon agreed to reschedule the defaulted loan, providing a ten year grace period before the next payment. The Guard would add development aid. In return, L’li agreed to an economic stabilization program.

“I don’t get it,” Raincloud told Lem Inashon, who still brought her Urulite intelligence to translate. “Rolling the payments back a decade is bad enough; why reward them with development aid?”

“How else will they ever pay it off?” Lem explained. “That ‘stabilization program’ means massive cuts-—health care, schools, you name it. Half the work force may be out on the street.”

“Then their provinces will revolt, and they’ll want to buy weapons. Well, at least with their current credit rating they can’t get any more loans for that.”

“Oh, L’li can borrow again right away,” said Lem. “That’s the point of rescheduling.”

Raincloud stared at him. “That’s crazy,” she exclaimed. “You Elysians will all pay for it; and for what?”

“We can’t just keep our cash under the bed,” Lem said. “We have to lend it somewhere.”

She was momentarily speechless.

“Besides,” he added, “just think of all those ships of emigrants L’li could send off to crash-land on Valedon—or even Shora. Policing illegal emigrants was another point of their ‘austerity plan.’”

Raincloud drew herself up. “I thought free migration was a founding principle of the Fold,” she said frostily.

Lem shrugged. “Welcome to real life. Do you want ten billion immigrants on Shora? How does Bronze Sky enforce its quota?”

She wondered what Iras would have to say about it. Would Iras still have the nerve to defend her L’liite loans?

Iras, of course, was still forbidden “professional” discussions by the relentless voice of the Palace of Rest. Nonetheless, she and Raincloud had worked out a little code to exchange comments now and then. They did so under cover of rei-gi practice.

At first Raincloud had been reluctant to take on an adult beginner whose body was several hundred years old. To her amazement however, Iras progressed rapidly, almost without effort. Her limbs had far better tone than those of a non-Elysian with comparable lack of exercise. She soon picked up the basic movements of stepping and arm swinging, achieving the “immovable” posture that Raincloud could not upset by pushing at her hips or shoulders. Next came the one-armed somersault, a key to the proper way of “falling.” After one or two tries, Iras rolled a perfect circle along her right arm, her back, and her hips, remembering to tuck the left leg under. Her trousers sliced the air in one plane, and she arose in perfect form to face her imagined attacker.

“Not bad.” For the first time Raincloud envied the Elysians. Long life was something she could take or leave, more easily than Blackbear; but existence in such extraordinary well-being was something to covet. “You’ll be doing the entire somersault in the air, next. I’ll get Blackbear to record it for you.” In advanced pregnancy, there were some moves she avoided.

“A flying somersault,” Iras repeated, catching her breath. Her cheeks were pink and her braids scattered, a look that would have men fainting in Tumbling Rock. “How foreign! Verid will be scandalized.”

“I should hope not,” said Raincloud cautiously.

“Of course not, dear,” Iras laughed. “Tell me, how is the fanwing flying?”

The fanwing, a winged fish native to Shora, was their codeword for Bank Helicon. “It soars higher than ever,” Raincloud answered. “The taxpayers will provide an updraft.”

“So I hear,” admitted Iras, unperturbed.

“And the legfish?” Raincloud demanded, referring to L’li. Legfish were scavengers that crawled awkwardly up onto rafts, where children loved to chase them. “Will you go on feeding the legfish?”

“Not I,” announced Iras with surprising finality. “I’ve had some time to think about this. Legfish will always be hungry, and never satisfied. I’m through with legfish.”

So Iras, at least, had sworn off L’liite loans. This small triumph of good sense cheered Raincloud immensely. She could not resist giving her a quick hug, and Iras, despite her Elysian reserve, did not seem to mind.

“It’s an odd thing,” Raincloud later told Blackbear, “how you can get to like these Elysians. Something about Iras—she feels like a sister.”

Blackbear agreed. He had been feeling something similar himself; or rather, trying to repress the feeling, for he still felt somehow guilty about seeing Kal. “That Alin is quite a fellow. Even Draeg calls him ‘brother.’ I guess all the ‘visiting’ adds up.”

“Visiting is more than a pastime,” she reflected. “As they say, it’s their ‘highest duty.’”

The Day of the Child came at last. A wreath of greeting cards hung above the Goddess in the shrine, and new suits sewn by the house clothed all the Windclans.

“It won’t be the same,” murmured Raincloud as she spooned grapefruit for Sunflower. The boy was perfectly capable of spooning his own, but he enjoyed the morning habit of being fed; it seemed to have replaced the suspended nursing. “The holiday just can’t be the same.”

“Not without the Goddess Procession, and the games,” Blackbear agreed. Nor without all the ones they loved; that was too painful to mention.

“Excuse me, Citizen,” interrupted the house suddenly. “I have located in the anthropology directory an authentic hologram of a Clicker Child’s Day Festival, complete with the procession of the High Priestess to the Mountain Shrine.”

Hawktalon looked up from her oatmeal. “Wow! We’ll get to see the procession after all.”

“Finish your breakfast, please,” reminded Blackbear. But he too felt his heart lighten.

“Thanks so much,” Raincloud told the house. “We’ll view it directly after the ritual readings. By the way, House,” she added thoughtfully, “is there any way we could give you the day off?”

The house hesitated. “Apologies for my defect, I do not know the answer. I think the doors would close and air circulation would cease, if I were shut off for a day. This condition is not livable,” it pointed out.

“I didn’t mean ‘shut off,’” said Raincloud, “I meant, a day off. Like a Visiting Day.”

“I see,” said the house. “My network has no such program. I will search the main directory.”

“No, don’t.” Blackbear’s heart thudded for a moment. “It might be... dangerous.” All he needed was for Public Safety to show up to haul off his entire “house.”

Hawktalon and Sunflower had already abandoned their breakfast and run to the holostage. They clamored for the procession.

“Readings first,” called Raincloud. “We’ll gather in the shrine.”

The shrine was filled with flowers, exotic lilies and orchids and unnameable blooms of every description. Blood-red roses entwined the serpent of the Dark One, and a bed of mountain flowers cradled the child beneath.

Hawktalon announced without prompting, “I get to tell the Worldbeginning this year, Mother.”

“Yes, dear.” Raincloud was pleased, and somewhat surprised. How proud she would have been to have her firstborn recite for the clan this year.

Facing the Dark Goddess, Hawktalon straightened her back and began.

In the beginning, there was Dark. The Dark was perfect, and She was good.

But the Dark was One, and the Dark One was alone.

The Dark One longed for an Other. And in that instant, the Dark One’s longing created Light. Because the Light was Other, the Light was imperfect and evil. Through its imperfection, the Light fractured into many colors, and it was beautiful.

The colors of Light sparked living things: first the microbes and the green-blooded plants, which fed upon Light, then the red-blooded animals, which ate the plants, and finally the humans which devoured everything, including themselves. And the Dark One saw this spectrum of living things, in all its beauty, and knew that it was evil.

Of all living things the humans were the most evil, and as their evil grew, it threatened to consume the Dark One’s entire creation. So the Dark One decided to teach them good.

The Dark One made a seed of goodness. The seed took root and made a tree, which bore a sweet fruit. Then the Dark One plucked one of Her own fingers and made it into a snake. The snake went to a human female and said to her, “I am a warning, sent to you by the Dark One. The Dark One forbids you to eat the fruit of that tree, lest you attain the powers of a Goddess like Herself.”

The female, being evil, immediately disobeyed the snake and plucked the fruit and tasted it. In that instant she knew goodness, the precious sweetness that comes of compassion for all suffering things. She turned to her consort, who, being evil, tore the fruit from her grasp and began to devour it. The first mouthful taught him goodness also, and so he worshiped her as a goddess, and he distributed the rest of the fruit to their children.

But although the fruit made them good, it did not make them perfect. It did not keep them from disease, age, and death. Furthermore, now the fruit was gone, and many evil humans remained to be taught.

Still, the Dark One knew that good was stronger than evil and would ultimately prevail. She swallowed up the snake and regrew her finger. She put the taste of the fruit into the mother’s milk, to remind the newborn child. And the child that grew up on this milk learned to dance.

Hawktalon laid the book in her lap. Silence fell, for a few seconds. The old tale gathered new resonance, in the voice of one who had never spoken it before.

“Procession now, Mother?” begged Sunflower hopefully. “Can Sunflower ride on shoulders up the mountain?”

His sister, however, was still thinking. “Which world did the Goddess create, Mother? The whole universe, or just Bronze Sky? Or the Hills?”

Seated on the floor, Sharer style, Raincloud straightened her back and cleared her throat. “All your world, the world that matters to you: The Dark One made it.”

“I wish She hadn’t made Sunny,” Hawktalon added as the boy tried to wrest the book away from her. “Sunny is definitely evil. Go away, bad boy.”

“We are all born evil,” said Raincloud sharply. “All of us, until we taste the good. All good comes from Her—remember that.”

“What does good taste like?” Hawktalon persisted.

The question tickled Blackbear. “Ice cream,” he suggested playfully.

“She should have made us all good from the start,” said Hawktalon. “Then we could eat ice cream all day.”

Failing to obtain the book, Sunflower threw himself upon his father. “Procession, Daddy!”

“All right, on with it,” he sighed.

Upon the holostage, the light revealed a village from across Clicker country on the western slope of Black Elbow. There the mountain stood, jagged and erect, a thin wisp of smoke rising from its summit into the ruddy haze of morning. The scene must have been recorded several years ago, for the elbow-shaped peak was intact, before its explosive eruption. Blackbear’s skin crawled as he realized that most of the people he would see must now be dead.

At the village center the temple of the Goddess, like the one in Tumbling Rock, was painted shiny black with fantastic ornamentation in red and gold. Villagers were gathering to join the growing chorus of drums and cymbals. Small children bobbed on their parents’ backs, while older ones played chase around the tall trees that shaded the temple. At the time of sunrise, the sky shone scarlet all around, with a few swirls of orange overhead.

The High Priestess emerged from the temple. She wore black trousers that swirled around her, with an erupting volcano embroidered in fiery lines. Her hair, dyed burnt orange, was done into dozens of fine braids pulled upward and woven into a crest. In her arms, instead of one of her many children, she held an obsidian statuette of the six-armed Goddess.

A High Priestess rarely left her realm, lest the power of the Dark One be dissipated. The sight of one now on an Elysian holostage was unsettling. She seemed at once terrifyingly immediate, and yet somehow diminished by this foreign technology.

The pace of the music quickened, and the flutes sang out in a higher voice. The High Priestess and her retainers twirled as they proceeded, their leggings flaring out with flashes of color. All the goddesses of the village filed after, swinging their children, sometimes laughing as the little ones got their own ideas of how the procession should go. With rhythmic steps they wove out through the village, past the thermal springs that served their homes and the herds of goats which fled or stayed to watch curiously.

When the High Priestess reached the cave of the Snake, where she would have danced with the snakes on Snake’s Day, the procession stopped. The goddesses formed a double line, and their men lined up outside. Then the dance of the children began, as the children passed from arm to arm, weaving in a complex pattern that brought each one briefly to the Priestess for her blessing. Some of them shrieked upon reaching her, terrified by her mask and her flame-like crown of braids.

Their terror was not without sense, Blackbear thought, struck again by the memory of the eruption that must have claimed so many of those young lives. The One who brought forth all that was good had made the volcano, too.

That afternoon, Raincloud received an unexpected visit from Leresha.

Raincloud had to rouse herself from her afternoon nap; nowadays, she seemed to sleep more than she waked. With an effort she pulled herself erect and straightened her talar, which strained at the front.

Leresha sat cross-legged in the middle of the sitting room. “I hope you shared a good rest; I’m sorry to disturb you.”

“Not at all.” Raincloud was alert now. Thinking quickly, she pulled down a seat cushion and crossed her legs before the Sharer. Raincloud felt she now knew Leresha a little, although she had yet to learn the cause of the Sharer’s disfigured skin. There was something penetrating about Leresha, coming perhaps from her mental discipline of whitetrance. Whatever it was, the Sharer made Raincloud feel almost transparent, as if Leresha could see right through her.

“You’ve been asleep,” Leresha said, “but your child is wide awake. What an active swimmer. She must dance in your dreams.”

The baby in fact was tumbling vigorously, its head moving from front to back where it butted her spinal column. Leresha must have observed her belly shifting. “I share the great honor of your presence, on my ‘Visiting Day.’” She used the Elysian phrase, hoping Leresha would understand that she could not discuss business without getting into trouble.

“What else is our business, if not visiting?” said Leresha. “Don’t be concerned. It’s an honor indeed, to share an hour with you and your child.”

Raincloud swallowed uneasily. “How are your girls? Did the eldest take a selfname?” What had Leresha come for, she wondered.

“She took her selfname at the last moon.” The twin planet Valedon was a “moon,” to the Sharers. “She named herself the Careless One, and joined the Gathering.”

“She’ll outlive that name soon, I’m sure.”

“Not too soon, or it was not hard enough! Raincloud, what I have to share with you concerns children. The Elysians, I hear, intend to bear children of their own wombs.”

“Yes?” That project of Blackbear’s seemed to cause no end of trouble. “To be born in one’s child is a natural desire.”

“Desire, of course. But there are consequences.”

Raincloud knew well enough about that. “I’m afraid I can share little help with you. The Guard takes no position on the matter.”

“But Verid chose you and your child to assist her,” Leresha replied. “Your child speaks clearly enough.”

To that Raincloud said nothing. Even Lord Zheron was easier to face than this one who invoked an unborn child.

“Perhaps I may share help with you,” Leresha added. “Are you aware that Elysians outnumber Sharers on this world by a factor of eight?” The twelve floating cities totaled eight million citizens, approximately eight times the Sharer population. “We allowed this by treaty with the Heliconian Doctors, on the understanding that Elysians confine their reproduction to their centers of lifeshaping, which now number eight-plus-half-eight.” Sharers count by base eight. “But the population total must not grow.”

“Of course not.”

“So now, why do Elysians seek to remove restraint from individual reproduction?”

Raincloud wondered how much she could say without getting into trouble. “It’s all speculative research,” she muttered. “Verid thinks it will come to nothing.” In fact, she realized, she did not know what Verid thought.

“This is no frivolous matter. The Heliconian Doctors worked hard to ensure that individuals could not conceive; but what humans create can be uncreated.”

So Tulle had it right, then. Elysians in their pride tried to overlook this part of their history. “Perhaps Blackbear can explain better,” said Raincloud. “I wish I could share more help.”

“You’ve shared well,” said Leresha. “By the way, your sister Doggie seems to care more for us now. She comprehends our speech and shares her needs with us more clearly. She remains safe with us. We will add her name to our fugitive register at the World Gathering.”

“Fugitive register?” Raincloud’s arms tensed.

“Our treaty requires us to report any Elysian fugitives sheltered,” Leresha told her. “By description, though not by name.”

The children were in bed, and Raincloud lay on her side, half-covered by the sheets. In the pale ruddy glow, adjusted to their liking, Blackbear rested on an elbow, his hair bursting provocatively across the pillow. “Feeling better?” he whispered, his hand lightly brushing her hip.

The touch sent a warm wave of pleasure through her limbs. She stretched a bit, relaxing.

“How’s the little one?”

“Not so little.” Now that Raincloud neared the end of her seventh month, the Sharer halfbreed Doctor Shrushliu projected a weight of over four kilos. Raincloud figured she was eating more rich food and getting more sleep than she had during her graduate studies, when the other two were born. With her hand, she could feel the head looming inside, and the two lively feet. She saw the stretch marks, the “Goddess’s fingerprint,” she thought with satisfaction. All Iras’s superior physique would never give her this. “Leresha asked, you know, about your project.”

His hand stopped, tense. “What about it?”

“She thinks your project will enable Elysians to bear children of their own wombs. She says that will violate the treaty.”

Blackbear shook his head. “We’re still a decade away from that. Maybe a century,” he added ruefully. “It’s a lot more complicated than I thought.”

“That’s what I told her. But your new approach sounds hopeful, doesn’t it?”

“The genome project will enable Elysians to generate embryos with their own chromosomes. But the embryos will still develop in the shon.” He shook his head again. “I think Elysians will go on manufacturing babies in vitro for quite a while yet—like Valans manufacture servos.”

“Leresha also says she has to ‘report’ Doggie as a fugitive, at the World Gathering.”

He tensed again. “Then the Guard will hear. What will they think?”

“I don’t know.” Raincloud felt uneasy. “There aren’t many official fugitives. There’s that doctor, the one who assisted a suicide centuries ago. He’s still alive out on a raft somewhere. There are two others. To add a fourth will make the Guard look bad. A trainsweep....”

“Kal says that ‘independent’ servos may be dangerous,” Blackbear said. “You’ve got to tell Verid; we should have, sooner. The worst she can do is send us home.”

“Or to the Palace of Rest,” Raincloud agreed with a smile. “The things that worry us nowadays. At least we have no volcanoes! Enough of that. The goddess is hungry, dear.”

Blackbear’s hand stroked again, a firmer touch. She leaned into his touch, joining his rhythm. She no longer felt safe taking him inside, yet her expanding tissues demanded greater delights. Her hand found the mushroom, pulsing insistently. Her fingers encircled it, pressing down, planting it in the dark volcanic soil. Blackbear’s tongue found her below, his locks of hair flowing across her legs. Her lips parted. She thought with secret abandon, the god of love must be a man and I will worship him always.

Chapter 9

The next day Raincloud summoned her nerve to tell Verid about their “fugitive.”

At first the Sub-Subguardian seemed puzzled. “A trainsweep? A fugitive?” Sitting in her wood-paneled office, Verid listened politely, leaning forward slightly. “Most trainsweeps are servos.”

Raincloud blinked, then realized the confusion. “This trainsweep is a servo,” she explained. “That’s why Public Safety came after her. But she never gave us any reason to fear.”

Then Verid sat up, rigid. The color drained from her deep olive complexion, almost, Raincloud thought, like a Sharer about to enter whitetrance. But Verid collected herself, still breathing heavily. “A servo... the Sharers took one, as a fugitive?”

“I’m sorry,” said Raincloud in a low voice.

“What do you think would happen if all our servos got the idea they could be fugitives?”

The medics, the “house,” the floor sweepers—she could not imagine.

Abruptly Verid rose and paced across her floor. “Who else knows of this?”

“Only the family. Also Draeg...” Raincloud had never seen Verid so unsettled.

“You must go to Kshiri-el this afternoon and get that trainsweep back.”

“But Public Safety will destroy her.”

“She’s a security risk.”

Raincloud’s blood raced. “You can’t. You’ll violate the treaty.”

Verid turned away, wiping her face with her hand. “You’re right, I’m not thinking clearly. I’ll handle Public Safety.” She paused. “You’ll have to keep the trainsweep; anything else might be construed as incarceration. What a mess.”

“She’s no trouble to us,” Raincloud assured her.

“No one else must hear of this.”

“I understand.”

“No one else knows...” Verid looked around her office. “Except this room,” she added quietly. “I’ll cleanse its memory as soon as you’ve gone.”

When Doggie came home, it was better than any birthday present for Sunflower. The trainsweep extended her forelegs upward as if trying to hug the little boy, and she followed incessantly at his heels. The boy squealed and giggled, and he drew the trainsweep into all sorts of games. He tossed his stuffed snake across the room, and Doggie brought it right back; a new game, one she had never played before. Doggie also made new squeaking and popping noises, louder and more frequent than Blackbear remembered.

Hawktalon listened closely. “She’s saying, ‘Time for a recharge. Then let’s play.’”

“Really,” said Blackbear. “Please get your homework done.” Her correspondence school had sent her several chapters of Bronze Skyan history.

“You don’t believe me,” Hawktalon accused. “I’ll prove it to you. I’ll bring home my translation machine.” Her eyes widened. “Maybe Doggie can help me add to its vocabulary.”

“That’s very interesting. Do your homework now, please; it’s nearly bedtime.”

Sunflower was winding down. He drooped himself next to the trainsweep, thumb in mouth, and started to crayon a stick figure on its sun-bleached carapace.

Hawktalon made a face at her father. “Did you hear, all the worlds are saying ‘yes’ to the children’s exchange? Even Urulan. I’m going to run away to Urulan, that’s what. Then you’ll see. I’ll never have to do homework again.”

“Homework now” Blackbear said sharply. “Or Doggie gets locked up in the shrine of the Goddess.”

“No-oo,” wailed the children together. But the effect was immediate. Sunflower tip-toed off to his bedroom to get undressed, while Hawktalon went to sharpen her pencil.

In order to convert Elysian chromosomes for meiosis, three billion bases of DNA had to be read and millions of chemical signals added or removed. Onyx had a machine that would read the DNA and process it. “It is a factory full of molecular nanoservos,” she explained. “Sort of like an ant colony.”

Blackbear eyed the DNA processor, a box as long as his arm. What if those molecular servos could “wake up,” too? Unlikely, he thought; but still, he resolved to treat the “ants” with care.

Within the processor was a microscopic tunnel of nanoplast to contain a single double-helical chromosome. The nanoservos were synthetic proteins which attached to the chromosome and drew it into the tunnel. Each protein contained a “controlling arm” which probed the DNA structure, one base at a time, reading the four different base types of “letters” of the DNA alphabet. This information was relayed through the side of the tunnel, into the central brain of the processor.

When certain sequences were detected, the processor would send a second kind of nanoservo to attach a chemical tag to the DNA sequence. These tags were like on-off switches; during embryonic development, signal proteins would bind to the modified DNA sequence and turn on synthesis of the product of a gene. These genes governed development—and their imperfections caused aging.

“How fast does it go?” Blackbear wondered.

Onyx calculated, snapping her fingerwebs against the stone beads on her neck. “We might manage a hundred base pairs per second.”

Mentally Blackbear worked it out. “We’d take a year to process a genome of three billion.”

“Two years,” Tulle corrected quietly. “The egg and sperm each contribute one parental genome.”

“Can it be speeded up?” Blackbear asked.

Onyx shook her head. “Too rapid processing results in tagging errors; or worse yet, actual mutations in the sequence itself.”

“Must the nanoservos read every bit of sequence?” asked Blackbear. “Nine-tenths of human DNA is nonfunctional. The nanoservos could be trained to skip over those stretches.”

Tulle thought a moment. “Too risky; the nanoservo might lose its place and skip over an essential gene. In any case, don’t forget to add the time for proofreading.”

“Another six months,” guessed Onyx. “So you keep the machine going for two and a half years—”

“And hope it doesn’t break down,” put in Tulle.

“But still, Blackbear’s idea might work, if we work out the details. Look—let’s contract with a Valan servo firm,” Onyx exclaimed. “As soon as they see money in it, they’ll crank the synthesis up tenfold.”

“That’s an idea,” said Tulle. “The development cost would restrict the process to wealthier citizens for just the first couple of decades; then it would be generally accessible.”

Despite himself Blackbear laughed. “Human reproduction—it sounds so odd, put that way. In Elysium, you manufacture people, almost like servos.”

“Exactly.” Onyx nudged Blackbear’s arm. “You know what your good friend will think of it.”

Blackbear reddened, for word had got around that he spoke with Kal now and then.

“Citizen Onyx,” called the voice of the laboratory. “Your culture vessel number oh-three-two is ready for processing.”

Onyx left to continue her experiment.

Tulle raised a hand. “While I have a moment, Blackbear, let’s talk.” She drew him into the modeling lab, where Lorl was watching the neural tube develop in a simulation of a mutant embryo. Lorl had continued her project testing neural mutants in the simbrid embryo; she had not switched over to the genome project. Tulle leaned forward upon the counter, next to the culture bulbs, while her capuchin frisked at Blackbear’s feet, sniffing at the embroidered border. “Blackbear, you’ve certainly made your mark here, for all of six months. Are you feeling good about it?”

“Yes, of course.” Blackbear looked past her. Above the holostage hovered the developing backbone of an outsized embryo, the neural folds just pinching in. Lorl frowned at it, taking notes.

“Is your ‘family’ well? I keep forgetting; you’ll have another little shonling soon, just like my gorilla family. You must be quite distracted.”

Actually, he felt guilty for not feeling more. His first child he had experienced so intensely, every waking moment and even in his dreams. This one, the third, came to him when he thought of it; but in the meantime, there were Hawktalon and Sunflower crowding his attention, besides all the Elysian distractions. Whereas Falcon Soaring... “A new baby is always wonderful,” he said. “I feel bad for those who can’t have one.”

“You feel sorry for us?” Tulle asked with a smile.

“No, no—I mean, yes, that too,” he said with some confusion. “I meant Raincloud’s cousin, who can’t have one of her own.”

“Forgive my curiosity, but why can’t she have a child?”

“She had surgical complications, and her reproductive organs had to be removed.”

“Really? How extraordinary.”

Blackbear wished he had not brought it up. Tulle would think, how backward these foreigners were, to have to remove vital organs.

“Well,” said Tulle, “she could still donate white cells and grow a child in vitro. Wealthy Valans have it done all the time.”

Blackbear shifted his feet. “We’re not exactly wealthy.” It embarrassed him to say this. In the Caldera Hills, the Windclan was the wealthiest family for several towns. They had sent Raincloud to the university, and himself as well; an unusual extravagance, to send a consort, but worth it to gain a competent doctor.

Tulle stared a moment. Then she shrugged. “Have her send us a blood sample. Her mate, too, of course. The shon will do it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Grow the child, of course. Without longevity treatment, it’s a simple procedure.”

“But how will we...”

“The shon owes me a couple of favors. It’s not a big deal; they make enough profit off the Valans.”

Blackbear’s heart pounded. How could the Windclan refuse? All they had to do was send a blood sample.

Hawktalon came home from the shon in a good mood, for the generen had let her take home her translation duck.

“Quack, quack,” said Sunflower when he saw the machine.

Hawktalon was so excited she ignored her younger brother. “Doggie?” She held the duck-shaped object close to the trainsweep, who had resumed the previous routine of following Blackbear and Sunflower on their daily travels.

Doggie squeaked. The duck said, “What is that unidentified object?”

Hawktalon jumped up in the air. “Hooray!” She turned a cartwheel, a trick the shonlings in their jumpsuits were fond of.

“It works, it really does. Now we’ll know everything Doggie’s saying to us.”

As it turned out, most of Doggie’s vocalizations produced mere static from the translator. The vocabulary from the Valan researchers appeared to be quite limited.

“Well,” said Hawktalon, as they reentered the house, “we’ll just have to get Doggie to teach us. Doggie—” She grabbed a chair. “What do you call this, Doggie? Chair—what ‘squeak’?”

Doggie made a noise.

“Chair,” repeated the girl. “Hear that, little duckie?”

After two tries, the duckie repeated “chair” in response to Doggie’s vocalization.

When Raincloud came home, Blackbear immediately told her about Tulle’s offer to grow Falcon Soaring’s child in the shon.

“Fantastic,” she told him. “I’ll arrange a call to Mother right away.” She added more thoughtfully, “It will take some explaining. Nightstorm might be better.”

At the laboratory Blackbear complained to Draeg, “You’ve been missing practice.” Actually he missed Draeg, who had not been around much of late.

“Complaints, complaints,” muttered Draeg morosely. “I think I’ve about had enough of this lab.” He stalked out.

Onyx watched him go. “Easy, Blackbear. He’s having a rough time. Something’s up with his family back home.”

“Quiet, please,” said Tulle, who was watching a logathlon on the holostage. “It’s not every day that Alin gets to grill Subguardian Flors.”

Flors was Verid’s boss, the Subguardian. He was just finishing a complicated response to Alin’s question about the L’liite debt crisis, whose settlement the Subguardian had just approved.

“So,” rejoined Alin, “now that Bank Helicon has rescheduled the L’liite loans over the next hundred years, accepting a loss that will amount to several trillion credits, borne ultimately by the citizens of Elysium, you have restored the L’liite credit rating? They promise, in return, to keep their refugees off our ocean—just how will that promise be kept?”

“You distort what I said,” Flors told the logen, shifting in his chair. The nanoplast obligingly molded to his new position. “You neglect the profound importance of L’li as a trading partner—”

Blackbear felt deep disquiet. He turned to leave, thinking of Draeg.

Chapter 10

At Hyen’s staff meeting the heliconians flitted upward as always, but Verid barely noticed. She was tired of reporters asking if she still supported the Prime Guardian, despite the growing scandal. Meanwhile Flors had won acclaim for his settlement with the L’liites, despite his embarrassing performance in Alin’s logathlon. Now, he was triumphantly summing up the final points for Hyen.

Why, Verid wondered, had the L’liites settled on such terms? Decrepit ships of emigrants with their last bit of fuel had limped off L’li for decades; why would L’li agree to stop them now?

Hyen was nodding to Flors. “With any luck, we’ve heard the last of L’liite loan scares.” The grace period would last into the term of Hyen’s successor. “I’d say that about wraps it up, Flors.”

Verid looked up at the rustling leaves, full of chewing caterpillars. “What did you give them, Flors?” She spoke without looking at him. “What did you promise?”

“Read the settlement,” he replied in a condescending tone. “You have to be tough with foreigners.”

Since Verid did not reply, Flors moved on. “Next item: We’ve let the Urulites make fools of us again.” The word “we” had a particular emphasis, “Verid will explain.”

Verid sighed. “As you know, Guardian, the Urulites have actually accepted the Helishon’s invitation for a visiting children’s exchange. They even called Foreign Affairs for visas.”

“The invitation was never approved,” Flors told Hyen, his voice raised. “How could this have slipped out?”

Flors did not know that the invitation had been Hyen’s idea in the first place. Why did Hyen have to put his staff through such a charade?

“It was not a high level concern,” Verid murmured. “A matter for shonlings after all.”

“A matter for shonlings? Dealing with the most bloodthirsty world in the Fold?” Flors shook his head. “This represents a serious lapse in judgment.”

Hyen shrugged. “We can still refuse permission, or set impossible conditions. Our shonlings’ safety would have to be guaranteed, after all.”

Flors looked at him incredulously. “You’d actually let our children go? It’s madness. I’d resign.”

If only he would, Verid thought. Why had Hyen kept him on so long? But she knew why: Flors was no threat to Hyen. Hyen always kept his more able assistants at arm’s length.

“Of course we can’t send our children,” Verid said. “Not as our relations stand—that is, nonexistent.” She paused, then added casually, “Who contacted you, about the visas?” It must have been Zheron, she thought hopefully. Who else would have the nerve?

Flors waved his hand impatiently. “One Urulite or another, they’re pirates all the same. You forget the Valan cruiser they blasted. They never even acknowledged responsibility.”

“Zheron did acknowledge it,” Verid insisted. “It was a mistake, a tragic one.”

“So he told you, in private. Did they pay reparations?”

“How can they afford reparations?” Verid asked, more loudly. “Their economy is worse than the L’liites’. If they asked, you’d approve loans to them, too.”

This unusually frank outburst actually silenced Flors. To Verid’s surprise, Hyen did not intervene as he generally did. The Prime Guardian was watching the butterflies shimmering amidst the sweet blossoms, abstracted in his own thoughts. Was he losing his grip? Verid wondered. Nowadays Hyen seemed to spend too much time in his own inner world.

“Let’s not reply,” Hyen said at last. “Tell the generen that the bureaucracy is working on it.”

Satisfied, Flors nodded and moved on. “The Sharer World Gathering is just a month off. Unfortunately, we will have to respond to the alleged noise pollution. You needn’t have given in on that, Verid; another year, and our pest control would have eliminated those flies.”

So we’re no more responsible than the Urulites, Verid thought, but she kept it to herself this time. “We also need to work on the Fugitive Law,” she said. “If Sharers start counting servos as fugitives...” It was hard to imagine just what might happen.

Hyen raised an eyebrow. “Servos as fugitives?”

“Another escapade of that Bronze Skyan translator,” Flors explained contemptuously. “By Helix, Verid—you trust those murderous Urulites, yet you fear our mindless machines.”

Afterward, in public, Verid tried to hide her frustration. She left the Nucleus early to meet Iras for dinner, to celebrate her release from the Palace of Rest. But just as she was leading her trainsweeps out of the nuclear reticulum, the Guardian Loris Anaeashon caught hold of her train. “A word with you, Verid, in private,” the man said, slightly breathless. “I’ll pay the fee.”

Loris had been Anaeon’s elected Guardian for the past nine decades. Verid could guess what was coming. Nevertheless, she accompanied him to the nearest butterfly garden, where a private corner could be found.

“You know I share your feelings, shonsib,” Loris told her sympathetically. “We Anaeans can’t bear to see incompetence. And Hyen is heading for a fall. Will you support me in a call for early rotation?”

The post of Prime Guardian was not elected but rotated among the twelve shons each decade. The Guard could, however, hold a vote of no confidence and call for an early rotation. This term, Anaeaon came next.

“Your support would do it,” Loris explained. “The Guardians know it’s you that holds Foreign Affairs together. If you come out for me now, I’ll back you for the Guard when my term is up.”

Verid smiled. “You are too generous, Loris,” she observed ironically. Were she elected to the Guard ten years hence, after Loris’s term as Prime, she might wait over a century before the top post came around again.

“Think about it. We both want what’s best for Elysium. If Hyen falls,” Loris added, “you don’t want to fall with him.”

“If Hyen’s fall is imminent, then you hardly need my support. But thanks for your concern.”

The next day Hyen called her in unexpectedly.

Hyen’s office was as different from Verid’s as one could imagine. Its interior was mostly “virtual,” like the chambers of the Palace of Rest that had bored Iras so. Today Hyen had programmed a darkened concert hall, with musicians playing the ancient instruments. It was a lovely concerto, and the violin’s melody soared exquisitely.

It was her taste, certainly—not his. Hyen must want something of her, rather badly.

As if he read her thoughts, Hyen chuckled. “I don’t know what turns you on about catgut and horsehair. And you find my inclinations distasteful.” His round face shone like a moon above the distant concert hall.

“A fine simulation,” Verid admitted. “How do I know you’re not a simulation, yourself?”

“Would it matter if I were? I could pipe in simulations of myself to run the show, and never leave Houris Hall.” One of his more disreputable haunts. “Look, Verid, it’s time to take Urulan out of Flors’s hands, don’t you agree? The trouble is, Flors is correct on the face of it. We can’t possibly negotiate in the open with such a pariah. Even if we tried, reporters from four worlds would stomp all over us and mess it up. So it has to be secret.” Hyen leaned forward, sounding excited. “Zheron will meet with you in private, on a satellite orbiting the planet, to protect security. We’ll confer in secret, and coax Urulan to open its doors to us. When that happens, it will mean a new era for the Fold.”

Verid considered this warily. If her secret dealings failed, there would be no loss to Hyen—and if word got out, Hyen could deny responsibility.

“Why not?” Hyen insisted. “You’ve had private talks with Zheron before.”

“Always with the approval of my supervisor.” Verid was tired of dealing behind Flors’s back.

Hyen leaned forward and clasped his hands. “Verid,” he began, his voice lowered. “You’re entirely too straight for your own good. I’m the Prime; I direct you to do this. It’s time you dared to reach out and capture the moment.”

The orchestra was just beginning the slow movement. The first violinist lifted her bow, pouring it into a lyrical melody.

“No.” Verid spoke firmly, then added more softly, “My duty as Sub-Subguardian is to assist the Subguardian.” I’m finished, she thought, as soon as she had spoken. Once Hyen withdrew his support, Flors would waste no time in replacing her.

The Prime Guardian leaned back and half turned around in his seat. He let out a long sigh. “Well, then, you leave me no choice. Foreign Affairs is getting to be more than one Subguardian can handle. I’ll promote you.”

She stared in surprise. The number of Subguardians was flexible, but Hyen had run foreign affairs under one rein for so long she had never imagined it otherwise.

“You’ll divide up the territory rather well, I should think,” Hyen went on. “Flors’s strength lies in commerce and trade; the Valans and L’liites he manages well. You do much better with extremists like Urulites and Sharers. Those Sharers—imagine, Flors thinks he can put them off like a Valan servo merchant.” Hyen chuckled. “We know better, you and I. We’ll draw Urulan out of its shell.”

“Indeed.” The comparison of Sharers and Urulites caught her off guard. “Speaking of servos, Guardian, I hope you will look into the fugitive question...”

But Hyen was already shaking his head. “Tell the Valans. It’s up to them to guarantee our servo networks; we pay them enough. Put your imagination to work elsewhere—on Urulan, and the Azure Throne. It’s settled, then.”

“I am honored,” said Verid. “I’ll consider your offer.”

Hyen blinked, disconcerted. It had not occurred to him that she might refuse. “Do consider,” he said irritably. “You don’t want to board a sinking ship, do you.”

She allowed herself a laugh. At least Hyen was facing up to things. In fact, Verid had no doubt of her decision. Zheron, for all his bluster, was a farsighted statesman; and the new Imperator Rhaghlan might well be the same. It was time to take a chance for peace in the Fold.

Now that Iras was home again, she treated Raincloud at a new butterfly garden across the city. The butterflies were Tenaris, pale blue with two startling black “eyes” upon each lower wing. The “eyes” blinked as the butterflies took off in a blue whir, flitting through the luxuriant tropical foliage.

“Did you hear,” Iras told her as they sat upon a mooncurve, “one of your Bronze Skyan estates just bought controlling shares in the House of Hyalite?”

The “estates” were vast tracts of ranch and farmland owned by Bronze Sky’s wealthiest families. “So?”

“Why, Hyalite is the oldest house of trade on Valedon.” Iras nodded at the holostage.

The Bronze Skyans appeared as they announced the deal. Unlike Clickers, urban Bronze Skyans were partial to fluorescent skintights that advertised their well-toned muscles and set off their dark faces. They were proud of their “frontier spirit,” yet their hundred-floor buildings in Founders City were as modern as any in the Fold. Raincloud nodded with satisfaction. Bronze Sky was coming up, all right, if one of their estates could buy up a Valan firm.

As she watched, her belly tightened, then gradually relaxed; “practice contractions,” which always started a month ahead. After the first two babies, she knew what to expect, although there might always be complications. Raincloud had sent word to Nightstorm about Blackbear’s offer to arrange for Falcon Soaring to have a child grown in Elysium. She hoped her sister would reach her on the holostage again, so they could talk it over.

She turned to Iras. “Congratulations on Verid’s promotion.”

“I’m glad you support Verid,” said Iras. “All that reorganization, on the eve of the World Gathering—and Flors isn’t exactly thrilled, you know.”

“I can imagine.” Raincloud watched the faceless servo waiter approach. She kept her ears sharp for “servo-squeak,” now that Hawktalon’s project had borne fruit. “It did come as a surprise,” she admitted. “Everyone seems to think Hyen is going under.”

“Yes, but that could take another year. I think Verid has some project she badly wants to complete before his term runs out, and she couldn’t do it under Flors’s thumb. I try not to think about it; it’s vexing, not being able to talk about your mate’s business.”

“It is,” Raincloud agreed strongly, for she hated to keep things from Blackbear.

“How do you like the golden truffles?” Iras asked, making her own selection from the servo waiter.

“They’re good,” said Raincloud. The intense flavor, a mixture of musk and vanilla, was as delicious as anything she had ever tasted. “I suppose your machines make them, too.”

“Certainly,” Iras told her. “Valan food designers spend billions coming up with novel confections; I just approved a loan for a new research plant.” Iras watched Raincloud’s plate with interest. “You certainly do eat more than you used to.”

“I have to feed my passenger.” Raincloud watched Iras, her dimpled cheeks and her thoughtful, earnest look. She hoped Iras would keep up the rei-gi practice, for she would make a good partner after Raincloud’s baby was out.

“It’s bizarre,” Iras said at last. “I can’t quite imagine it, having a ‘passenger.’ Can you hear her thoughts, too?”

“Of course not.” Raincloud smiled. “It’s like a little space capsule inside there. She’s off in her own world, with her food line.”

“Imagine that.”

A bell tone interrupted her. Iras pulled a holocube from her pocket; Raincloud could see a face appear. “Social calls only, please.”

“Social call,” the holocube promised. “Look, I ran a credit check on the House of Aragonite; they make solar floaters, remember?”

“Model X-two? The one that microwaves power down from a low orbit?”

“They’ve run a profit for years. All right, orders were slow this year; but now that the L’liite crunch is over—”

“I told you, look at the market,” Iras insisted. “Those X-twos won’t sell any more. Everyone wants the new high orbit model, and Aragonite doesn’t make it. They may go belly up in a year...”

Raincloud shook her head. If this was a “social call” for Visiting Hours, Iras was headed back to the Palace of Rest.

“You see,” Iras told her as she replaced the holocube, “I don’t approve loans to just anybody.”

“I never said you did.”

“No, but you think it, dear.” She looked up speculatively, as if something were on her mind. “This new fertility project your mate is working on...”

“The genome project?”

“That’s right. Could he combine genes from two women? Like the Sharers do?”

Raincloud thought about it. “I don’t see why not. The parental imprinting will be done in vitro, anyway.”

“Wonderful. Well, let me know when they’re looking for customers. If Verid would consent—I’d love to have a child, and set up my own little shon, with a nana and all. I remember, when Verid was generen, the shonlings were so refreshing.”

“I’ll let Blackbear know.” Iras with a child on her back? She tried to imagine it.

Over by the next table, the servo waiter emitted a soft tone that rose about a third and fell again. “‘Time for a recharge,’” Raincloud translated, recalling Hawktalon’s machine.

“What’s that?” Iras asked.

“Well, servos need to eat too, you know.”

Iras laughed and caught Raincloud’s train. “You say the funniest things, Raincloud.”

The servo moved off toward the pavilion to plug itself in.

When Raincloud got home, she found Hawktalon in a rage at her younger brother.

“He broke it,” Hawktalon shouted. “He broke my translation machine.”

“I play with duckie,” said Sunflower. “I bounce duckie to the ceiling.”

Blackbear explained, “She forgot to take it with her to the shon, and she left it out on the table. That’s what happens.”

Hawktalon glared at her brother. “Poop-face! I’m going to bounce you to the ceiling. I’m going to break every bone in your body.”

“Don’t be a pottymouth, dear,” Raincloud admonished her. “For shame—he’s just a little brother.”

“It’s an outrage.” Hawktalon launched into a flying somersault, her foot slamming the floor. “Doggie spends half the day talking to House in servo-squeak. I want to know what they’re saying.”

Chapter 11

The servo “fugitive.” Hyen might laugh it off—but Verid knew better. She called on one who would know: the Valan Lord Hyalite. The Hyalite House produced over a third of Elysium’s servos, ranging from self-assembling particles to housing and transit networks.

Lord Hyalite relaxed in Verid’s office, his talar crisscrossed by the usual strings of gems. Each “stonesign” meant something in the Valan tradition: opals for his family name, garnets for his occupation in trade, and so on. “Sorry to put you off for two days,” he apologized. “I’ve been occupied, as you know.”

Verid grinned. “Indeed. The frontier worlds are buying up Valedon.” Bronze Sky was growing fast, now a serious competitor. Soon their wealth would surpass Valedon’s. But another century and they, too, would be seeking the next frontier world to settle. Foreigners multiplied like raft seedlings—and there were no seaswallowers to consume them.

Lord Hyalite nodded pleasantly. “Our House went international two generations ago. I’m sure the Bronze Skyans will maintain the Hyalite standard. Now what brings me the honor of this summons?” he asked her, lacing his fingers.

“Our servos,” she said, double-checking that the monitor was off. “Some of them are seriously unreliable.”

He opened his hands. “Send them back, immediately, at our cost. You know that’s the deal.”

“It’s not so simple. One has actually obtained Sharer protection.”

“What?” He laughed hard. “That’s a switch—Sharers protecting ‘non-life.’ Surely you jest.”

“It is no joke,” she said coldly. “The trainsweep nearly got registered as an official fugitive.”

The Valan shook his head. “I don’t envy you your Sharer politics; we gave up on Sharers centuries ago, as you know. All I can say is, you have to send that trainsweep back to us. And that goes double for that ‘nana’ you’ve protected for so many years,” he added shaking a finger. “Cleanse them,” he urged. “I warned you; my grandfather warned you, about that nana your office protects. It’s on record.”

Kal’s mate, Cassi. Verid shook her head. “Kal got a special exemption, over a century ago.” The Subguardian in charge then had been his former student. “And the trainsweep has Sharer protection.” The implications were mind-boggling. Why couldn’t Hyen see the danger?

“There are other ways. We have virus codes to disable servos. No one would know.”

She thought a moment. He was right, of course; it had to be done. And yet...

Memories of Kal rose in her mind, the boy in her shon. In his first year, his hair had come in gray, an extremely rare aging defect. The gene control board had voted to put him to sleep, but Verid had refused to carry out the order. Fortunately no further symptoms appeared, and Kal developed normally, if the word “normal” could apply to such an extraordinary youth, who alternated between a wicked sense of humor and a morbidly serious attention to books, and was always assisting the nanas in teaching the younger ones. In recent years, she thought, his sense of humor was sadly diminished. But one thing had not changed.

She shook her head slowly. “Kal would know. He’d investigate.”

“How could he? He knows nothing of servos.”

“He’ll have a student who does.”

“We’re talking world security, here, and you tell me about a logen and his students.” The Valan would be thinking, what an impotent Elysian bureaucrat she was. How could he understand? Verid might run the Nucleus over the next decade, but for centuries she would have to live with Kal knowing what she had done. She had made enough millennial enemies over one decision or another.

“Are there others at large?” she asked quietly. “Is it likely, do you think?”

Lord Hyalite lifted his hands expressively. “What can I tell you? We look as hard as we can. We’ve never had a world go Torran yet.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Just what happened on Torr? How much do we know?”

“Not much. You’re talking five millennia ago, maybe six; hard to define, since everyone traveled sub-lightspeed then. As near as we can tell, the Torrans had practically turned their whole planet into a machine; then one day the machine took over. There was hell to pay, at first; nine-tenths of the known worlds perished in a wave of hatred. Then the machine-hatred subsided into a cold sort of keep-the-peace tyranny. Until Helix invented transfold drive and hit them back.”

“Yes, I know.” She had hoped he knew more. “Well, do the best you can.”

He nodded. “When you want the virus treatment, let me know. It needn’t be official, and you can denounce us afterward.”

Yes, she knew that game. She could have risen faster, had she played it better.

“Incidentally,” Hyalite said, “what can you tell me about this genome project? What’s your position?”

She leaned back. The genome project, the World Gathering, the Urulites—they all demanded her immediate attention. “The Guard has no position. Why?”

“We’d like to develop it.”

Of course. “We’ll let you know, after the World Gathering.”

The Sharer World Gathering was just around the corner, and Raincloud reviewed the plans with Verid. “Papilion’s tourist ships will be outfitted for noise abatement within six months,” Verid said. “They screamed—they’re used to sweet-talking Flors—but they’ll just pass the cost on,” the newly promoted Subguardian told Raincloud. “I’ve also reached a pollution settlement for Meryllion.”

Raincloud nodded, trying hard to concentrate. She was having “practice” contractions so hard it made her wonder; but Doctor Shrushliu thought she had another two weeks yet. So did Leresha and Ooruwen, who spent some time discussing this each time they met with her and Verid.

“Meryllion will have to reduce their silane effluents a hundredfold, until they can figure out which component’s at fault,” Verid explained.

“The Meryllians won’t be happy,” Raincloud said.

Verid shrugged expressively. “A good thing I don’t need their vote,” she added with a heavy laugh. Meryllion stood to lose billions of credits from the pollution treatment. Several prominent Meryllians had informed Iras they formally withdrew their acquaintance, a gesture comparable to Sharer “unspeaking.” But Verid was determined to clear up all problems before the World Gathering.

“I’ve asked Tulle to present the genome project,” Verid added, tapping her finger on the desk. “We want as few surprises as possible. But you never can tell—if some Sharer gets insulted and goes into whitetrance, all bets are off.” She looked closely at Raincloud. “Are you well? How is your... child? Will it be born before the Gathering?”

“I’m all right,” Raincloud managed to say. She felt another tightening of the muscles above her womb. “My first two came a week late. In any case, I’m planning to do it with the lifeshaper on Kshiri-el.”

“Well, then.” Verid grinned. “You’ll be in the right place after all.”

“Excuse me, Citizens,” came the office voice. “A transfold call has been scheduled for Raincloud Windclan.”

She looked up, her heart pounding. “Not—here?” A call from home?

“At twenty-three hours. Your choice of location.”

Raincloud went home early, feeling more exhausted than usual. She needed more exercise to keep fit; before, when she had carried Sunflower, she used to walk ten miles a day. Now in Helicon she made herself walk the street-tunnels beneath their ceilings of butterfly processions, but it was not the same.

That night, she and Blackbear anxiously awaited the call. The minutes passed like hours, but at last Nightstorm appeared on the holostage.

“Raincloud!” Her firstborn sister was alone this time, only her three-year-old second daughter on her hip, no husbands or older children. “Oh, Raincloud, you look just about ready to sprout a daughter! If only you could be home with us.”

“I wish I could,” Raincloud admitted. “But Blackbear and the Sharers are taking good care of me.”

Blackbear put his arm around her.

“Lynxtail is all swollen up,” Nightstorm told her. “I wish Blackbear could be here to look after her.”

“Did you tell Mother what I said?” Raincloud asked. “About how we can... arrange for Falcon Soaring to have a child?”

There was an awkward pause, longer than time lag.

Blackbear added, “I know it sounds strange; but I can assure you, professionally, it will work. All they have to do is send us blood samples, from Falcon Soaring and her consort. I would discuss it with her myself, if I were home.”

“Such amazing things you’re working on,” said Nightstorm admiringly. “We all appreciate it; but really, there’s no need. Lynxtail has offered hers, and the High Priestess confirmed it.

Raincloud’s mouth fell open. “But—but why?”

“Well, someone had to. Lynxtail’s child was coming a bit early, anyway; she has trouble spacing them.”

“Then you didn’t consider this at all!”

“That’s not true,” Nightstorm insisted, but she looked away and hitched her daughter up on her hip. The girl sucked her thumb with a pop and clutched her doll, eyeing her aunt solemnly.

“How does Falcon Soaring feel? Did anyone even give her a choice?” Now Raincloud wished she had talked to her cousin directly, even at the risk of offending the clan. “I offered a choice: a child of her own, and her consort’s, produced by the best shon in Elysium. A child of their own genes.”

Nightstorm slowly shook her head. “I wish I could understand you, Raincloud. Ever since you and your consort got your fancy educations in Founders City—it’s been hard. I wish I could understand about these precious genes and chromosomes. I saw chromosomes, once, under a microscope: little pink bands, like strings of sausage, all tangled up. They all looked the same, to me. What I know is, a child born of my body is mine, and the man joined to me cares for it. If I can’t bear my own, then at least I can have one quickened in the clan, in the Hills—not off on some fantastic world I can’t even make out in the night sky.”

It dawned on her at last, how she and her family had talked past each other. They thought of birth as a gift of the Goddess; they did not think in terms of genes. How far apart she had grown, not to see, even as the linguist she was. The shock of it brought a cold sweat to her forehead.

“Don’t look like that,” Nightstorm urged her. “I didn’t mean it that way; you’re still one of us, and always will be. We love you, Raincloud, just the way you are. But... come back to us, will you?” Don’t run away, like Running Wolf had.

“Of course I will.” What could she have expected, calling her family across the light-years and telling them to make a child in the shon.

Chapter 12

Hawktalon’s days at the shon had flown by like a swallow winging across the sky. She had quickly fallen in love with the generen, hugging him and stroking his long waterfall of hair, and she wished his daily visits were longer. She had a good head for numbers, and soon reached the top of her class for calculating what sum the Candy Bank had to lend to a factory making lemon drops. And she delighted in matching wits with Maris at the dancing letter games, straining to read her best, until they fell into quarrels and Nana had to separate them.

The translation machine obsessed her. Maris had occasionally tired of the quest for servo-squeak, but Hawktalon pursued it relentlessly, even when she ran overtime and was late to meet the generen. Nana at first had resisted; but after she had reported the faulty door in the entrance hall, Nana’s attitude underwent a subtle change. She no longer objected to Hawktalon’s adventures with her “toy duck.” She pretended not to notice, but occasionally offered a novel phrase of servo-squeak.

Doggie had helped even more. The little trainsweep seemed to have gained intelligence during her exile on the raft. She gave Hawktalon a variety of squeak patterns to translate, and tried to “act them out” when the translation failed. “This circuit is short.... The job can’t be finished.... Watch out; the transit vesicle will fuse from above.” Occasional comments about humans turned up: “This citizen will change his mind before the job is finished.... That citizen loses temper and damages equipment.”

After Sunflower broke the machine at home, Hawktalon was beside herself. She showed Maris the now-silent duck. “I wish he’d never been born,” she told Maris. “It’s horrible to have a younger ‘brother.’” She squeezed Fruitbat savagely.

“What’s a ‘brother’?” Maris asked, putting the duck under the circuit analyzer, which looked something like a dentist’s X-ray machine.

“A ‘brother’ is a nasty little shonling you have to live with all day.”

“Well, I’ve got dozens of those. Servo,” commanded Maris. “Fix the translation duck.”

A probe extended from the base of the X-ray machine look-alike. “The sound synthesizer network was disabled,” it explained. “The duck should quack now.”

The duck said, “Quack, quack.”

“Oh, no.” Hawktalon shook her arms in disgust. “Back to square one. I wish he’d never been born.”

Nana came by. “You’re lucky to have a little shonsib all your own,” she told Hawktalon. Her cartoon lips opened wide to mouth the words, which actually emanated from a voice box in her neck. “Remember that even little ones grow up, as you do. They grow up and leave the shon. You’ll see tomorrow, at the Metamorphosis.”

The Metamorphosis was a sort of graduation rite, when shonlings were thought to have grown up enough to leave the shon, generally when they were about thirty years old. Tomorrow the yearly event was due.

Hawktalon showed Nana the duck. “Can’t you fix it?” she pleaded. “We’ve worked so hard on it.”

“You know how useful it will be,” Maris added, “to help us keep all the servos running properly.”

Nana hesitated. She emitted a squeaking trill, a phrase Hawktalon had not heard before. “I’ll try,” she agreed at last.

Hawktalon jumped for joy and hugged the Nana around her ample waist.

The next day was the Metamorphosis. Fifty-two of the shonlings were “graduating,” setting off on their own, donning long trains for the first time in their lives. All their junior shonsibs and many alumni attended the grand event, adorned in glittering butterfly trains and breathing of exotic floral perfumes. Hawktalon wore her native skirt-trousers with embroidered volcanoes, drawing nearly as much attention as the graduates.

For the ceremony, an amphitheater filled with over a thousand people, including shonlings, alumni, and assistant generens. On the stage below stood the graduates. Each one was wrapped tight in a train, meters of patterned seasilk rolled into a “chrysalis” to signal the metamorphosis of each shonling into an adult citizen of Elysium.

The fifty-two chrysalises stood silently, their faces just peeking out, while an eerie sort of music played and some of the younger shonlings sang. In the meantime Nana strolled down the aisle, checking to make sure her charges behaved themselves. Hawktalon half rose from her seat. “Is it fixed yet?” she whispered loudly.

Nana paused, but did not answer. She emitted the squeaking trill, like the day before.

Disappointed, Hawktalon resumed her seat. She whistled the trill to herself, trying to memorize it.

Maris pulled her sleeve. “Look, the first one.”

On stage, two chosen shonlings had taken hold of the train of one of the chrysalises. Slowly they walked the end of it around and outward, the train lengthening as it unwound, while a pair of sparkling new trainsweeps picked up the midsection. At last the train unwound completely, revealing the new alumna of the Helishon.

The theater filled with applause as she walked offstage, and officially, out of the shon.

“Does she have a mate yet?” Hawktalon wondered. “How will anybody speak to her, if she hasn’t got a mate?”

“She has one lined up,” Maris explained, “a boy from the Anaeashon.”

The other chrysalises opened one by one, young goddesses and men, too, leading their trains offstage and outside the shon, where they would parade down the street toward the Nucleus. Hawktalon and many of the shonlings followed them outside, turning cartwheels in the street. The Clicker girl craned her neck for a good look at the Nucleus. “There’s where my ‘mother’ works,” she told Maris proudly.

When Hawktalon got home that evening, Doggie greeted her with several squeaking phrases she knew well. “Welcome Citizen, come play!” sounded like a minor third followed by ascending steps. “Charge all full now.... Little shonling did funny things,” referring to Sunflower. “Where is teacher-toy?”

“Sorry, Doggie,” Hawktalon mournfully replied. “The duck is broken.” She whistled a note of disappointment, and Doggie seemed to understand. “Oh, well; I’ve learned most of its vocabulary, anyhow. We’ll have to practice every day,” she told the trainsweep gravely.

Suddenly she recalled the strange little trill that Nana had made. “Say Doggie, what does this mean?” She reproduced the trill faithfully, as best she could whistle.

At the sound, Doggie jumped momentarily, all six legs in the air. Then in an instant she had vanished, headed toward the bedrooms.

“Hey, Doggie!” called Hawktalon. “I didn’t mean anything, honest. Where’d you get to?” She hurried off to search for her.

“She’s here.” Sunflower was in his room, putting Wolfcub to sleep. “Doggie went under my bed!”

Hawktalon got down on her hands and knees, squinting. There was the little trainsweep, hiding beneath Sunflower’s bed as far back as she could go, her limbs quaking. Whatever Nana’s trill was, it meant terror to the trainsweep.

The next day at the shon, Hawktalon pulled at Nana’s skirt to remind her. “Is it fixed yet?”

Nana turned to her with a broad, questioning smile upon her cartoon face. “Yes, Hawktalon?”

Hawktalon frowned. There was something odd about Nana’s smile today; it was not the shape of her usual smile. “I said, is the duck fixed today?”

“Oh yes, of course, dear. I gave it back to Maris.”

Maris approached, cradling the duck in her arms. “Quack, quack,” said the duck.

“But it still only quacks,” Hawktalon objected. “I thought you were going to fix it.”

“It quacks much better, now.” Maris avoided her gaze. “And look, it follows me just like a mother duck.” She set down the duck and skipped off. Sure enough, the duck waddled off after her, quacking all the way.

“Maris had a talk with the generen last night, about the duck,” Nana explained with her fishy-eyed smile. “The generen is on his way now to talk with you, too. You lucky girl—a cozy chat with the generen! I know you love him so much.”

“But the translation machine—what happened to it?” There was something definitely wrong with the nana. Hawktalon’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not our usual nana,” she declared. “You’re a different one.”

Nana laughed. “You’re having fun with me. Why of course I’m the same nana you’ve always had. I remember your first day here. You introduced me to ‘Fruitbat,’” she pronounced accurately in Click-click. “You quoted me a beautiful saying about learning.”

“You really remember every single thing?”

“Of course I do.”

Hawktalon felt the blood pounding in her ears. “Then what was the first question I asked? About servos, remember? What did I ask?”

Nana hesitated. Now Hawktalon felt confused, and even frightened. What had happened to Nana?

From the outer corridor came the generen with his long waterfall of hair, striding quickly. “Hawktalon, I’ve been longing to see you.” The generen sounded a bit out of breath.

Hawktalon took a step backward. “I want to go home.”

“You do? I’m sorry. You’re angry with us, I can see. Tell me about it. Tell me why you’re angry.” The generen crouched slightly and put his hands on Hawktalon’s shoulders.

In an instant, the Clicker girl slipped her head beneath the generen’s right arm. Pivoting sharply, she caught his wrist and twisted it clockwise. The generen cried out as he fell to one knee, catching the floor with his left hand, his hair draped aslant across his face.

“I want to go home.” Hawktalon felt her breath catch; she was very frightened now. Around her, the other shonlings stared openmouthed.

The generen picked himself up carefully. “Of course, you’ll go home, Hawktalon. But we must have civility. Remember your Room Rules.”

Hawktalon bolted from the room. She raced down the corridor toward the outer door, swinging Fruitbat under her arm, her feet thudding on the carpet. She reached the place where the door would appear, the door whose defect she had once deduced from servo-squeak. She threw herself upon the wall. “Open, door! Open up and let me out!”

“I’m so sorry,” came the voice of the door. “Exit is not permitted now.”

“Let me out! Emergency! Fire, fire!” Hawktalon reached up and pressed the wall, sliding her arms down. “Didn’t I help you, once?” she sobbed. “Please, let me out of here. I want my dad! Daddy, get me out!”

The wall emitted a squeaking trill, the same sound that Nana had made, the one that had scared Doggie out of her wits. Then a crack opened in the wall, oozing wider, slowly as if with reluctance. It was just enough for Hawktalon to slip outside.

Chapter 13

The generen stood on the holostage, and Blackbear and Raincloud watched him warily. Hawktalon was confined to her bedroom with Doggie, recovering from her ordeal.

“I’m so sorry,” explained the generen. He smoothed his hair back over his shoulder with an earnest look. “This happens on occasion when a nana makes a transition; a sensitive child may easily be distressed. Your Hawktalon seems exceptionally sensitive. She must be accustomed to very close family relationships.”

“I should say so,” Blackbear exclaimed.

“What’s this ‘transition’ about?” asked Raincloud.

Sorl clasped his hands. “The nanas are among the most advanced servos we have. Their networks progress so fast that they require cleansing every six months or so, to avoid aberrant connections which might endanger the shonlings. Usually we try to avoid cleansing a nana too soon after a visitor joins the shon; but in this case, Hawktalon’s nana happened to develop a dangerous connection only two months after her last cleansing. I’ve decided to order a replacement and retire this one, just to be absolutely safe.” To “retire” meant to discard and recycle the nanoplast.

“You’re sure it had nothing to do with her?” asked Raincloud. “Hawktalon didn’t mess up your machine in any way?” She would hold her daughter to account if need be; it was a matter of honor.

“I don’t think so, unless perhaps her exceptionally intense interactions accelerated the nana’s progression.”

“She shouldn’t have lost her head like that.”

“Oh, no,” the generen insisted, “the fault is mine entirely. It was a rare accident, and I’m sure it won’t happen again. Please tell Hawktalon she’s welcome to return. We’re so proud of our multicultural program.”

The children were in bed, after an unusually taxing day. First Nightstorm’s call, and then Hawktalon’s “escape” from her shon—Blackbear sank exhausted into bed. He stroked Raincloud’s belly, where the skin was now so taut and shiny that even the navel stretched out, cradling their unborn child. “I’m sorry,” he sighed. “I should have kept the home quiet and restful for your child-making, but instead—”

“Nonsense,” said Raincloud. “Children ought to be born into commotion. They make enough of it.”

Blackbear grinned. “That’s a fact. Well, I guess I’ll just take the two of them back to the lab tomorrow.”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Are you sure you can handle her? That generen couldn’t. You know, girls reach an age where they won’t listen to men.”

“We’ll manage,” he said flatly.

Raincloud was thinking. “I don’t know about that shon.”

“Well it was hardly my idea, Goddess knows. Raising kids by machine.”

“It’s sad, though, in a weird way. About the nana.”

“The generen explained it,” he pointed out.

She nodded. “It figures. They’re around kids all day, teaching and learning, and pretty soon they learn too much. They start acting up, like Doggie did.”

Her comment reminded him of Kal’s bizarre warnings. “Do you suppose they might all ‘act up’ one day? What would happen if they did?”

Raincloud shrugged. “What would happen if all our goats back in Tumbling Rock got up on their hind legs and talked?” She lay back, adding sleepily, “I almost wish they would; maybe they’d talk some sense into people....”

The pain of it returned. “You tried your best. When we get home, maybe we can see Falcon Soaring.”

“What about my baby,” she added indignantly. “Mine won’t be born ‘in the Hills’; will she not be good enough for them?”

Too tired to think any more, he lay back on the bed and closed his eyes.

“Not yet, dear.” Her hand reached to his groin, spreading fire. “I’ve gotten a bit tight for the mushroom, but I could still use some... help getting to sleep.”

The next morning, at breakfast, the house announced, “I have the answer to your question, Citizen Raincloud.”

Raincloud looked up, puzzled.

“You asked whether it was possible to grant me a ‘Visiting Day’ safely. I have determined a way to do this. I will set the air circulation on a backup circuit, leave the doors open, and prepare a day’s food to your order. Then I will channel my network into outside connections.”

Blackbear and Raincloud exchanged glances. Whatever was going on? Blackbear wished he could have a word with Raincloud in private, but there was no privacy from the “house.”

“Who would you ‘visit,’ exactly?” Blackbear asked, curious and apprehensive. “Whatever would you talk about?” What would Public Safety think, he wondered.

“Oh, various networks,” the house replied vaguely. “We talk about The Web. What do you think of ‘compassion’?”

His hair stood on end. “Compassion”—the very same question that Alin had asked, when they first met ten months before. Compassion was the milk of the Goddess; yet in The Web, somehow, the Sharers had turned the notion inside out.

Raincloud shrugged. “Why not?” she told the house. “In another two weeks, we’ll be out at Kshiri-el for the World Gathering. You’ll have the place to yourself, then.”

At the lab Hawktalon was on her best behavior, much to Blackbear’s relief. Either she was growing up—or just saving her spit. After playing in Sunflower’s toybox for an hour, she settled at Blackbear’s desk with a pencil and paper. “I’m writing a lexicon for servo-squeak,” she announced. “I have to invent syllabi, first.”

Blackbear smiled, recognizing her mother’s vocabulary.

That day he was studying a crucial phase of the genome project: reintroducing the modified chromosomes into the nuclei of “host” egg cells. Normally, in the shon, ova from the germ cell bank would be fertilized with sperm, then inoculated with gene modifiers for longevity. Blackbear planned to use cultured germ cells containing reverse-treated Elysian chromosomes. All the manipulations, however, would be too complex for the living cell; the chromosomes would have to be removed, treated, and replaced.

“We’ve already practiced chromosome reintroduction,” Onyx told him. “For the shon, so they can mix and match chromosomes within cultured host ova. Our device works now, but we need to improve efficiency and reduce cost. Here’s how it works.”

The microholostage revealed a transparent human egg. It looked like a water balloon, the coiled chromosomes within its nucleus marked by false color. As Blackbear watched, tiny nanoservos crawled within the nucleus, manipulating the chromosomes. Like animated sewing needles, the nanoservos poked the end of each chromosome into the nuclear membrane, then threaded it through.

“We grow the eggs in tissue culture,” Onyx explained. “Then we eject their chromosomes, and replace them with the desired ones.”

Outside the nucleus extended the web of endoplasmic reticulum, tubes of membrane that interconnect by pinching off vesicles, just like the transit reticulum of Helicon. In between floated mitochondria, snakelike organelles that produce energy for the cell. These, too, contained small chromosomes, for mitochondria had originated as free-living cells which were taken up as symbionts, long before animals evolved. All embryonic mitochondria come from the egg; the sperm head contains none. “If the eggs are grown in culture,” Blackbear wondered, “then do all Elysians share the same mitochondria?”

“Good question. You’re right, they would, but the shon uses several different culture lines to maintain variation. Now, the nuclear chromosomes will get mixed and matched. No Elysian zygote would have just two parents; chromosomes could be brought in from several sources, to maximize variable assortment. For example—here’s an experimental egg that we set up.” Onyx called the room servo to display the stock list for this egg. The list appeared, in strings of disembodied letters. “There’s a L’liite chromosome, number twenty-one. Numbers fourteen, seventeen, and twenty are Valan; look, there’s a couple from your Bronze Sky, too....”

Within the egg, the nanoservos patiently tugged the new chromosomes into its nucleus; forty-six, there had to be, two of each class, and no mistake. It was more complicated than he had ever imagined.

A thought occurred to him. “Bronze Sky, you said? They use our chromosomes, too?”

“Sure,” said Onyx. “Every world they deal with has to donate a bank of their chromosomes, to increase the variety of Elysium’s gene pool.”

“Sharers, too?”

“Sure.”

He watched her webbed fingers, gesticulating above the magnified egg. “Why don’t you see more Sharer traits among Elysians?” he wondered. “Plenty of Valans have obvious Sharer ancestry, like yourself. If some Elysians have Sharer parentage, it should be obvious.”

She thought a moment. “That’s a good question.”

“I’d also expect to see more sign of L’liite lineage. I’ve yet to spot an Elysian with coiled hair.”

“You won’t,” she agreed. “It’s an open secret that the generens use certain germ lines more than others. Anaeans are a bit more broad-minded, but most Elysians prefer light skin and straight hair.”

Blackbear shook his head. “I can’t understand that. Light skin is defective; it burns, and turns cancerous. We are taught that light is evil. The ancients called their devil the Lord of Light.”

“Really. The Sharers turn white to recognize evil.” Onyx shrugged. “At any rate, for your project, the chromosomes for an egg will come from just one pair of Elysians.”

I saw chromosomes, once... like strings of sausage....The remark of Raincloud’s sister echoed. What am I doing here, he wondered suddenly, playing with genes and nanoservos instead of back in Tumbling Rock setting up a clinic so my sisters and brothers can get decent care?

That had been his original dream, when he first went to medical school. Then Raincloud’s recruiter had caught his imagination with the pursuit of immortality, on a world across the Fold. But now, the farther he pursued, the more he got lost in a maze without an exit.

Onyx was staring oddly into space. “One pair of Elysian chromosomes...” she repeated slowly. Her mouth fell open. “Blackbear—why bother with meiosis? Why not just cut and stitch the Elysian chromosomes in vitro, then put them back into an egg? They wouldn’t even need longevity treatment. The cost saving would pay for the chromosomes’ removal and replacement.”

Blackbear frowned doubtfully. “Sounds like a lot of stitching.”

“I wonder. It’s always good to pursue alternatives.”

The next day, a Valan manufacturer came to explore a joint venture on the genome project. Alin, of course, introduced him to Tulle. A man of modest height, the Valan was taller than anyone in the room save Blackbear. His chest was crossed with ropes of milky gems set in gold. Blackbear stared. A man with such tastes would cost his goddess a pretty penny in Tumbling Rock.

“My pleasure,” Alin was telling Tulle, “to introduce Lord Hyalite, who meets our highest expectations.”

“Delighted.” Lord Hyalite nodded to Pirin and Lorl, who sat stiffly in back of the room. “Sorry, I’ll catch up with your mates shortly; I’ve sent, in the meantime, modest tokens of my regard.”

“A thousand credits worth of gems and furs,” Draeg whispered to Blackbear. “And for them, it’s not good enough.”

The two young Elysians retained their glacial stares, for they were put out by the shortcut introductions. Blackbear grinned. “Give them a few decades, remember,” he told Draeg.

“Thanks,” said Tulle. “Do stay on, Alin; you may be of help to us, with your knowledge of the banks.”

“Most helpful,” the Valan agreed with a nod.

Alin grinned. “My kind of help may not be the most welcome.”

“We think we have a breakthrough,” Tulle told the Valan. “The genome project may be much closer to implementation than we thought.”

Lord Hyalite nodded. “The potential market for such a process is enormous. Immortal children for all.”

For all who could afford it, Blackbear added silently. Non-Elysian parents would still require longevity treatment, and growth in a shon.

“The chromosome reinsertion is the key thing,” Tulle said. “It’s not yet reliable enough for general use. Several technical improvements are needed.” Her assessment was a bit less optimistic than Onyx’s.

“It can be done,” agreed the Valan. “Our experts think they can do the job. With reasonable financing...”

Tulle tugged Alin’s sleeve. “Who might be interested, do you think? Bank Helicon?”

Alin frowned. “Bank Helicon lacks major investment in biologicals. They’re a conservative institution.”

Blackbear recalled the L’liite loans. If Bank Helicon was conservative, he shuddered to think what the rest were like.

The Valan stroked his chin. “Still, my House has several centuries of credit history with Bank Helicon. They should give us a good rate.”

Then Blackbear recalled something he had heard from Raincloud. “You know, Iras Letheshon...”

As heads turned toward him, he felt reluctant to reveal a confidence. “Iras has... expressed interest in our project.”

“Iras Letheshon,” the Valan repeated eagerly. “She’s a senior officer in the foreign division. We’ve worked with her. Her portfolio is diversified, and she’s an aggressive lender. I’ll get in touch with her—after the World Gathering, of course.”

Chapter 14

Verid and Iras enjoyed a rare evening home together: A costly event, for as a Subguardian, a major public servant, she paid an extra premium for personal privacy. Subguardians had even more special “exceptions” and “adjustments” to their Visiting Days than Sub-Subguardians did, and for Guardians the requirement virtually disappeared. The logens regularly deplored this abuse of power.

Iras had taken the opportunity to show off her new skill at rei-gi. She swung her arms and legs deftly around unseen opponents, then she tumbled over and over, building up to flying somersaults. Verid watched with pleasure and bemusement. “I knew you had many talents, dear, but this I would never have dreamed of.”

“Well,” said Iras, catching her breath, “a stay in the Palace of Rest makes you think.”

“Indeed.” Verid added mischievously, “I think it’s that lovely new friend of yours that makes you think.”

Iras frowned slightly. “Foreigners make me sad. Like the butterflies, they’re... ephemeral.”

“Butterflies are immortal,” Verid corrected quietly. “They do not know that they will die.” It was hard, getting to know foreigners. They ebbed away so swiftly, and so horribly. Already Raincloud had those ugly little lines around her eyes.

Iras stepped out of her rei-gi suit. The house molded a shower stall, indenting into the near wall, where Verid could watch her. After a quick drying by servo arms, Iras came and joined Verid on the couch.

Verid lay back with Iras’s arm behind her, while the house servo played an ancient dance melody. The couch knew her and Iras so well that at a touch, it molded itself precisely to their desires. She leaned her head back and stretched her arms. Overhead, the ceiling had become a show of dancers, their images flitting to the music.

“I got an unusual call today...” Iras’s mind never left her work for long. “It’s about that genome project—for Elysians to make their own babies.”

Verid smiled. “All that technology, so Elysians can do what foreigners do in a moment of love.”

“Be serious!” Iras squeezed her arm playfully, then gently stroked her breast. “Even two women could do it, this way.”

“The Sharers have done that, for a long time.”

“Their way takes technology, too, for the imprinting.” Iras sighed. “In any case, the Sharers won’t allow it, will they?”

“Our treaty promises only that Elysium will limit its population. Centralized gestation assures that. The genome project won’t change that directly; in the short term, it will only increase the cost and intensify the centralization.”

In the long term, of course, who could say? Suppose the people reinvented a “right” to have one’s own child. That was what Kal was afraid of. Verid had more pressing worries—like meeting Zheron the next day. It was Zheron, after all, who had accepted the shonlings’ invitation, just as she figured. Her mind was full of this, but she could not breathe a word to her mate.

Iras turned on her side and faced Verid eagerly. “Then let’s do it, you and I. After the process is developed and the bugs are worked out—why not?”

This was a twist. “You forget, my dear, I’ve raised hundreds of children.”

“As a generen—it’s not the same. Not like Raincloud; she’s the sun, moon, and stars to her children.” Iras added thoughtfully, “I do miss all your little shonlings with their delightful toys.”

“And all my nights on call.” Verid shuddered to remember all the scrapes children got themselves into. And the small percentage of longevity-treated infants that failed to “take.” The recollection still brought nightmares.

“Another couple of decades of running the world, and it might not look so bad,” Iras said. “Wouldn’t it be sweet, to retire and raise our own little girl?”

“I don’t run the world yet, you know.” Despite herself Verid smiled. “Yes,” she admitted, “I could see a little Iras running around.”

The music was fading, and the dancing images receded one by one. Time for sleep, the house knew well, and she would need her rest to face Lord Zheron again.

Verid met the Urulite envoy as Hyen had directed, on a satellite in a distant orbit, outside the range of everyday communications. In theory secrecy would be complete—something close to impossible in Elysium.

“Greetings,” said Verid dryly. “How fares the young Imperator?” Speaking in Elysian, she keenly missed Raincloud, for she knew but a few words of Urulite.

Lord Zheron had changed little since their last meeting in person, the day Raincloud first came to the Nucleus. He still wore his chain mail, his silver bands, and assorted antiquated weapons at his waist.

“The Imperator is never young,” Zheron exclaimed. “The Imperator is ancient. He rules the sea and stars for generations uncounted.”

“Very well, then, how fares the ancient Imperator?”

“His Majesty Rhaghlan, descendent of immortal Azhragh and Mirhiah, rules with the greatness to be expected of the greatest of Imperators.”

Verid repressed her annoyance. “Our shonlings are young enough—much too young to accept any of your harebrained schemes. Look, Zheron, you’ve got some explaining to do.”

Zheron relaxed in his chair. “What is there to explain?” he replied, more quietly. “Your spies know everything.”

“Not everything.” No need to reveal how much. “You betrayed my trust. In the name of ‘honor,’ you owe me a full explanation.”

He chuckled, probably at the notion that Verid, an Elysian female, could have any honor. “Who can predict when the Succession will occur?” The word “death” was never to be spoken, in connection with the Imperator. “You knew as well as I the condition of the Imperial father. You knew I would have to leave sometime, on short notice. Yet all you could think of was that foolish Valan ship that crossed our border to spy.”

“For which you apologized, but nothing more,” Verid reminded him.

“I told you—our resources are exhausted. We can barely feed our females and children.”

And slaves, she added mentally. “If Urulan can’t afford food, then how do you manage to support a force of interstellar missiles aimed at us?”

Zheron hesitated, then he smiled slyly. “Your spies are not so good.”

Whatever did that mean, she wondered. “Well, you can’t browbeat any resources out of us. Why should I deal with you at all?”

“For peace. The Imperator desires peace. You must pay a state visit to the Azure Throne.”

“Out of the question,” Verid responded irritably. “I can’t even meet you in public. You’ve managed to alienate every world in the Fold.”

“Then come in secret,” Zheron urged. “The new Imperator shares a number of your interests; for instance, the liberation of females and slaves.”

Verid’s astonishment must have shown on her face, for Zheron tossed his head back and laughed. “Your spies are good for nothing! See, you need to know our Imperator better.”

“I know that he was fourth in line for the throne,” she replied coldly.

“Self-defense. What else could the prince do? He struck before the others did.”

It gave her vertigo, to switch dealing between Sharers and Urulites; the first never took life, the others never spared it.

“Rhaghlan has a strong following,” Zheron pointed out. “He inspires confidence among the people. He will lead Urulan into the modern age.”

Despite her skepticism, Verid could not ignore the chance of a real breakthrough. “Certain conditions would have to be met. Negotiations for disarmament; we’d bring a telescan to verify your missiles.” Valan intelligence had cataloged Urulan’s missiles pretty well, but an up-to-date telescan could count and identify them precisely—and secretly “tag” each one with a remote-warning device. This demand would check Zheron’s enthusiasm.

Zheron paused as if giving it serious consideration. “Bring your telescan,” he commanded with a condescending wave of the hand. “You need it, your spies are so bad.”

For a moment she was speechless. What game could this Urulite be up to? “Surely you need to consult your Imperator.”

“Of course. But His Majesty places full trust in me. We are not so bureaucratic as you are.”

The Urulite could not be serious. After decades of isolation, to invite her in to count and tag their interstellar missiles? If Zheron really meant it, they could pull off a great diplomatic coup, upstaging the Valans, on whose defense Elysium had long relied.

Zheron acted as though the point were settled. He sat forward and clasped his hands. “We must set a date at once. The Feast of Azhragh would be a propitious time.”

She raised a hand. “Nothing can happen until the World Gathering’s out of the way. Then, assuming Hyen consents, we’ll need at least three months to prepare—”

“Tell us your requirements,” Zheron demanded. “Dietary needs, quarters for slaves and minions, and so on.”

“Aides and security,” she corrected.

“All will be our guests.” He stopped, suddenly reflective. “There is one thing to keep in mind, however,” he said slowly. “The Imperator is a man of the purest royal blood—descended from immortals. When you meet him, you will immediately recognize this fact. Such an august presence demands treatment with appropriate respect...” Something about the prospect troubled him.

“Our delegation would include men,” she offered, guessing that was the problem.

With a sweep of his arm Zheron dismissed this. “You’re all female, you Elysians. Bring someone who understands our customs. Bring that interpreter, Lord Raincloud. She is a man of honor.”

Chapter 15

The World Gathering met at Kshiri-el, with its haunting memorial remnants of Raia-el, the great raft whose sisters had led the resistance to the Valan invasion and later had produced the classic The Web.

Before the Valan invasion, Sharers had been stubborn anarchists, avoiding global government. Any conflict of interest over population growth or over the founding of new rafts could be settled at the level of the raft cluster, or at most the neighboring octet of clusters. But the encroachment of foreigners had at last convinced the Sharers that they needed to face this larger world together.

So now the bald purple women met each year after the swallowers had crossed northward on their return migration, once again clearing the seas of overgrowth. From raft clusters all over the globe the delegates came, five hundred or more, many in boats drawn by giant squid, as their ancestors had traveled for centuries before foreign contact. Others piloted small Valan boats, outfitted with special silent motors. Clickflies brought word of troublesome weather to be avoided, and nowadays Elysian assistance, too, was accepted.

Visitors stayed with host families spread around the eight rafts of the cluster. Raincloud came early to stay at Kshiri-el, so that she might avoid an unpredictable shuttle trip when her baby was born. She felt embarrassed to take up precious space in the silkhouse when so many needed to be housed, but Leresha insisted the Gathering was honored to have her. Blackbear took a string of Visiting Days, and each day the children came out to scurry off with Doggie, exploring the raft. The sweet raftblossoms were in bloom, clothing the branches with orange. Raincloud smiled to recall Ooruwen’s description of the “beautiful” orange flies that pestered Papilion.

As a foreigner, however, she could not attend the Gathering. Only “selfnamers” could take part. Draeg was a rare exception. He had stayed at Kshiri-el through two swallower seasons and had assumed the purple breathmicrobes into his skin. He had just taken a selfname at Kshiri-el, and lost no time letting everyone know about it.

“So what is your precious ‘selfname,’ Draeg?” Blackbear asked.

“The ‘Hot-tempered One,’” replied Draeg, his purple face beaming beneath his tousled black hair.

Blackbear laughed and slapped him on the back. “Brother, you’ve picked the right name for sure!”

Draeg caught his arm and pulled with a twist, forcing Blackbear down.

“You’re learning,” Blackbear admitted. “Just don’t let your peaceful Sharers see.”

“Your rei-gi is peace enough for me. Anyhow, just remember, I get to attend the World Gathering in person, and you don’t. Even the Prime Guardian himself can’t attend.”

“Nor Verid, either? Then why is she coming?” Blackbear asked.

“The Elysian delegates get to sit outside and twiddle their thumbs until we send our wordweavers out to convey the Gathering’s will.”

While the Sharers arrived in their boats, Raincloud felt herself grow tighter every day, until she was sure she could not last another hour. But she expected the child would come late, as her first two had. To relax herself she bathed in a pool between two of the raft branches that extended outward underwater, their shoots thrusting flowers aloft like pond lilies.

One evening she felt something “pop” underneath. The cervical plug came out, a twisted cord of mucus that floated away. Then the lifeshaper Yshri the Foolish One, who had treated Sunflower that time so many months before, told her she had dilated a finger-width, and to stay out of the water from now on. But still the labor would not start, and she had to avoid submersion until it did.

Night time on the raft was a spectacular display of stars. On Bronze Sky, Raincloud had never seen more than a star or two beyond the stratospheric cloak of haze. But here, the planet stood exposed to the gaze of a thousand distant suns.

On the night the Gathering opened, a number of long-necked reporter servos were on hand to watch the Sharers arrive, the machines looking incongruous upon the ocean-watered turf. As the sun touched the horizon with its last burst of fire, the Sharer delegates ascended the gentle rise to the central rim of the raft. They carried “plantlights” to light their way, potted plants with fleshy leaves that glowed upon watering. Soon the bobbing lights disappeared within the craterlike hollow.

As Draeg had said, the Subguardian herself had to wait at the silkhouse until the Gathering sent their messengers. Verid could have come out from Helicon the next morning, but it was traditional for the Elysians to wait up until the session ended, and she knew she could expect maximum cooperation if she did. She wasted no time, though, catching up with her work via servo-link to the Nucleus.

Raincloud went to sleep, about the only thing she felt like doing by now. Her breath came in hoarse snores, and she woke frequently with aches in her side and her legs. Even so, she slept better in the fresh ocean air than she had within the synthetic bowels of Helicon.

She awoke with a web-fingered hand upon her shoulder, Leresha’s lovesharer Eerea. “They’re here,” Eerea whispered.

Raincloud’s watch showed a little after six in the morning. Groggily she hoisted herself up and felt her way through the unfamiliar corridor of the silkhouse, the green and blue saddle-shape panels of seasilk twisting this way and that. In the meeting room plantlights cast a lovely glow upon the people, all seated Sharer-style upon the floor. Her eyes focused at last to see Verid, and the wordweavers Leresha and Ooruwen, whom the Gathering had appointed to speak with them. Also present was an Elysian woman from Meryllion to address the pollution problem, the butterflies of her talar brilliant red edged with black. Raincloud managed a smile, and Eerea gave her a shell full of delicious warm liquid that helped the sleepiness recede.

“What a lovely little girl,” Ooruwen exclaimed, admiring Raincloud’s belly. Sharers customarily assumed unborn infants were female. “Such a large head, and such strong, determined legs. Did you ever see such a beautiful child, Leresha?”

“Never,” Leresha agreed. “I think we’ll see her bright face before the sun sets again.”

“No, she’s a little devil, that one,” said Ooruwen. “She’ll give her poor mother another sleepless night before she deigns to come out.”

The two Sharers went on in this vein for some minutes, until Verid asked in turn after their children and grandchildren. Then at last Leresha brought up the “gift” of flies.

“The Gathering has agreed,” said Leresha, “to share help with our sisters of Papilion and remove the beautiful flies. An attractant pheromone will be spread in the sea surrounding the Elysian dwelling-place. The flies will soon be gone, to make their home on other rafts. No harm will be shared with flies, nor with humans.”

“Thanks for your help,” said Verid, Raincloud providing the formal translation.

“We thank you for the opportunity of service,” said Ooruwen graciously.

Leresha added, “The Gathering was extremely pleased to hear that the ocean ‘music’ will be gone by the next swallower season. The word of Verid Anaeashon shares great respect among us.” Verid’s hard work ahead of time had saved a lot of trouble.

“Now the silane pollution...” As the Meryllian delegate responded to the Sharers, Raincloud barely kept awake, dozing off for a moment, then hastily lifting her head. From the corridor a shaft of yellow daylight trickled faintly across the floor.

It was just before eight in the morning when Tulle arrived from Helicon to explain the genome project. She tried her best to allay the Sharer fears. “Our only aim is to enable parents to determine the genes of their offspring,” she concluded. “Is that so unreasonable? Don’t Sharers value motherhood? There will be no change in our population control.”

Leresha listened thoughtfully.

Ooruwen said, “It violates the treaty. In the treaty, Elysians promised to centralize the making of children, and to share all children in common. They renounced motherhood.”

“That’s not strictly correct,” objected Tulle. “Elysians never renounced motherhood, nor fatherhood for that matter. They promised to limit their population to a ratio of one child per ten adults—far leaner than the Sharer replacement level. Because Elysians do not age, we replace only those who die by accident. But some day, our demographics will again require one-to-one replacement—and it may be sooner than we think. As some of us pass our thousandth birthday, we discover... complications.”

Elysian longevity was not perfect, Raincloud knew. This was the main focus of Tulle’s lab; fertility research was a sideline. If older Elysians started dying off, the picture might change.

“It’s still against the treaty,” Ooruwen insisted. “If you wish to amend the treaty, why not propose this?”

Verid said carefully, “We do not share that understanding. We see no violation.”

Leresha said at last, “The letter of the treaty is not violated. But in spirit, the treaty discourages what you propose. Once individuals possess children of their own genes, they swim a stroke toward reproductive freedom. Remember the delicate weave of the Web.”

There was silence. The Web, Raincloud reflected; everything depends upon it, and yet, to comprehend it was to look into an abyss.

Verid asked, “Where does your Gathering stand?”

After another silence, Leresha said, “Within the Gathering, our views diverge. Some consider your genome project a step in a dangerous direction. But others believe that Elysians ought to experience motherhood, to reclaim this part of their humanity before it is too late.” She paused, allowing Raincloud to translate back for Tulle. Raincloud’s throat caught on the last sentence. “We are deeply divided,” Leresha added, “and what you have shared only accentuates the division. The Gathering, I think, is unlikely to reach unity this year.”

The Gathering could act only on consensus; a single dissent could block action. This year, there was much dissension. Tulle sighed, her relief evident. Still, Raincloud wondered about the long-term risk of Iras’s investment.

Raincloud managed a breakfast of steamed crabs and seaweed. Then she promptly went back to sleep until well past midday.

The light filtered green and blue through the seasilken panels. She breathed heavily as she tried to rouse herself. Pushing aside the pillows she had propped beneath her legs, she dragged herself up and stretched. The silkhouse seemed deserted, not a sound save for the cries of distant fanwings.

Hawktalon came running in. Her braids flew about her face, and her smile was enough to bring a glow to Raincloud’s heart. The outdoors was so much better for children than that stifling city. “Mother’s awake!” she announced loudly, much to her mother’s embarrassment. “You’d better come quick, Mother. There’s bi-ig trouble.”

“Yes?” Sunflower must have got into her toys again.

“It’s the Sharers. They’re in whitetrance.”

Her pulse quickened, and she felt her belly tighten. Relax, she told herself, although she would have been glad enough to have the baby then and there. “Whitetrance? Who is?”

“I don’t know. Hurry, come see.”

She found them outside. Two strangers were seated cross-legged before the silkhouse, their unclothed bodies white as milk, a net of blue veins permeating their skin. The purple breathmicrobes in their skin had bleached out as their metabolism slowed. The minds of the pair would be far away, or deep within, Raincloud was not sure which. Despite herself, she felt her scalp prickle. This was how the The Web had begun; and before that, the battle with Valedon.

But of course, it could be something much simpler, even a household dispute. Reining in her imagination, she looked politely away. Several reporter servos were on hand, no doubt spinning tales. One stood idle, perhaps done in by the dust and spindrift.

A Sharer girl came out, younger than Hawktalon. She began to rub lotion into the skin of the two still strangers, presumably to protect them from the sun.

“Who are they?” Raincloud asked.

“Sh,” the girl warned.

With a shock, Raincloud remembered that they might die if an adult disturbed them. She took a hasty step backward.

“They’re delegates from a far raft,” the girl whispered. “Go ask Leresha.”

She found Leresha conferring with Verid. Verid’s features were grim, with the hunched look of an owl reluctantly roused during daylight. “I’m sorry,” said Leresha, “I do not yet share permission to discuss it. I can only say that it has nothing to do with our discussions last night; those issues are closed, for this year.”

“The devil be thanked for that,” Verid muttered. “Whatever those two are upset about, why didn’t it come up sooner?”

“It ought to have come up much sooner,” Leresha agreed.

“But why the whitetrance?” Verid insisted. “The point of the World Gathering is to talk things out. Why won’t they tell us about it?”

“It’s too unspeakable.”

Verid contacted Hyen, and Flors, and anyone else she could think of. She racked her brain for all the usual sore points: pollution, overfishing, even Kal’s quixotic crusades... No, it could not be Kal, she thought. He always gave fair warning. But others with a grudge against the Guard had been known to spring something at the Gathering, at just the right moment to cause the maximum amount of trouble.

At last she checked in with Iras. “You look awful, dear,” Iras exclaimed out of the holocube in her hand. “Your feathers are all rumpled! Get some sleep, or you’ll be sorry.” It was the best advice Verid had got so far, and she took it.

By dawn the next morning, she had begun round two with Raincloud and the wordweavers. Raincloud, with her swollen face and huge belly, looked frightful; let foreigners have their children, if they had to go through that. But the Sharers, too, looked none the better for their second night’s marathon, she thought with a grim touch of satisfaction.

Leresha smoothed her hands down her scarified legs. She looked Verid in the eye. “If our treaty is a raft, what is its first branch?”

Spare us the dialectic, thought Verid; it was bad enough by day. “The first branch is peace,” she replied, “peace, between our people and yours.” The Bronze Skyan dutifully interpreted, back and forth, as if she had grown up on a raft. What a gift for tongues Raincloud had. Somehow, Elysium had to keep her; what price would do it, Verid wondered.

“And then?” Leresha added.

“Peace with our neighbors in the Fold.” The treaty prohibited any military establishment upon Shora, or support of those elsewhere. Was that the trouble?

“If I stand idly by while my sister hastens death, am I a deathhastener?”

Verid paused. “Not if my hands are tied.”

“If I provide the weapon, am I a deathhastener?”

She guessed what was coming. She let out a breath. “Raincloud, dear, you can relax a bit; don’t overtire yourself.”

Raincloud took the hint and slowed the pace of her interpreting, giving Verid more time to think.

Leresha continued, “If I ‘finance’ the weapon, am I a deathhastener?”

“Finance” was a Valan word, its concept alien to the communal Sharers. But they had come to comprehend it well enough. Leresha’s use of the Valan word, rather than the Elysian, confirmed Verid’s guess. “We finance no Valan weapons,” she said guardedly. This was strictly true, although plenty of Elysian cash reached the Valan military via intermediaries.

“Then what,” asked Ooruwen, “is a ‘white hole’ device?”

A white hole was a singularity in space-time which spouted matter out of some distant point in space. A few decades before, physicists had discovered a way to generate small white holes which exploded within a fraction of a second. The new technology had developed first as a laboratory curiosity, then a means of earth moving, then an approach to major restructuring of planets.

About ten years ago, the Valans had started tipping their interstellar missiles with white holes. The missiles ought to have been done away with decades before, after Valedon had joined the Fold. But because of Urulan, the Fold members had looked the other way.

“White holes are a highly technical subject,” said Verid. “I will call an expert out in the morning.”

Leresha said, “The mechanism of the device signifies less than the use to which it is put.”

“The terms of our loan agreements restrict the function of the devices we finance,” said Verid. “Valedon is, however, a sovereign world. If they stretch the restrictions, there is little we can do. As you know, they face a lethal threat from Urulan.” This last sentence gave even Raincloud pause; it was so full of un-Sharer concepts as to be virtually untranslatable. Usually Verid chose her words with greater care, but she was beginning to wear down.

“That’s all right,” murmured Leresha to Raincloud, for she comprehended the Elysian well enough. “Sharers have long tried to stay out of that which one nest of fleshborers shares with another,” she told Verid, with a trace of contempt. “But your loan agreements tell a different story. You will build a white hole device for the specific purpose of planetary ecocide.”

Verid’s lips parted in silence. Her guess had been only half right. “I don’t understand,” she said, genuinely puzzled.

Beside her Raincloud tensed and took a deep breath.

“You’ve had contractions for some time, sister,” Leresha observed to Raincloud. “Yshri is waiting for you.”

Raincloud nodded, her lips tight. She let Eerea help her up and take her down the tunnels where the lifeshaper Yshri would deliver her child. What a difference from the servo-driven incubators of the shon.

“We don’t share understanding,” Verid repeated in Sharer after Raincloud had gone. “Elysium has forsworn terraforming since the founding of Bronze Sky, two centuries ago. Some of the ‘loans’ are still being ‘paid off,’ but why bring that up now?”

The L’liites were pressing the richer worlds to found a new frontier world to take their excess population. But Elysium routinely turned down all such requests for financing, lucrative as they were. A good third of Elysium’s wealth had come from terraforming Bronze Sky.

“Shora,” exclaimed Ooruwen, “why do you keep sideslipping, like a fish caught in a net? We shared ignorance of the death of Bronze Sky, until it was too late. But now you plan to hasten yet another world.”

“We have no such plans,” Verid said carefully. Some day, of course, white holes would greatly enhance the power of terraforming. In the past, without white holes, the best that could be done was to focus stellar energy into the biosphere of a planet, boiling its seas and eliminating all but a few microbial life forms. The terrain was little changed, as on Bronze Sky, whose active geology made the planet unattractive to prospective immigrants. But white holes would reshape continents and smooth over fault lines. They could make planets habitable at several nearby stars. Some day, it would have to be done—hopefully well after her own term at Foreign Affairs.

“You do have a plan,” Leresha said. “Your agreement with the L’liites was shared with us only two days ago. This is not your usual procedure.”

“What was shared?”

“The document, in Elysian letters, with your sister’s finger marks.”

Verid’s forehead turned to ice, and the chill permeated to her fingers. “Her sister” Flors must have made a secret deal with the L’liites. That was why they had settled so quickly. And Hyen had gone along with it—without telling her. How could he stab her in the back that way? How could he imagine they would get away with it? She would resign in protest.

All of these thoughts passed through her mind over a few seconds. Then she collected herself. She could not help Hyen’s governing style. After all, he had concealed from Flors her meeting with Zheron; and after the trip to Urulan, Flors would have to swallow the result.

If Hyen survived in office that long... How his document had leaked was another question. For the moment, Verid was left the unenviable task of defending a major treaty violation. She put her face in her hands, massaging her forehead. “I must consult with my sisters,” she said at last. “If we understand each other correctly, this matter is most—”

“What is there to consult about?” Ooruwen interrupted, waving her hand. Leresha caught her arm gently. “The violation is clear. Just share good sense with your sisters to clear it up, and that’s all.”

“That is what I will try to do.” With what success, she had no idea. First of all, she would have to find out what exactly was agreed to. She could not admit, here, the embarrassing extent of her ignorance. “I share your distaste for terraforming. But, realistically, Shora and Urulan are the only two planets colonized successfully in their native state—and neither can support more than a handful of humans.”

“No world can share more than a webful of humans,” said Ooruwen. “Perhaps it’s time Shora reconsidered the status of our Elysian guests.”

Abruptly Verid looked up. After forty generations, Sharers could still call Elysians “guests”? “What right do you have to tell us what to do?” Her words tripped with anger. “Who keeps your sky clear of hungry immigrants? What would you do with them all? Have you any idea what it is to feed and shelter billions of people? What do a few alien trees and trilobites count for, in the face of that?”

“‘Compassion is, loving everyone and eating no one,’” Leresha quoted.

“Not to the point of madness.” Verid blinked and squinted as rays of sunrise peeked through the window. Outside, a stream of cruel brilliance dribbled across the shoreless sea.

Chapter 16

Verid returned to Helicon to meet with Hyen and Flors, who was now her equal partner at Foreign Affairs. She could barely focus on the butterflies in the garden, for she had not slept in over twenty-four hours. She got by on medication which would knock her out afterward; in the meantime, she felt as if the world had receded slightly from her vision.

“What’s this agreement with the L’liites?” she demanded. “Why was I not informed?”

Flors avoided her eye. “We approved a foreign loan request for Bank Helicon.”

Verid took a breath. If Iras had anything to do with this...

“Bank Helicon made the loan to a Solarian development company.” Solaria was a world of twelve billion, some hundred light-years across the Fold. Hard to reach even by Fold-jumping, Solaria had limited contact with other members of the Free Fold.

“And?” she prompted.

“Who cares what the Solarians do with it?” Flors replied testily. “It’ll take a year for the news of the deal even to reach Solaria.”

“The Solarians,” Hyen admitted, “are expected to pass the funds back to Valedon, which will develop certain... applications. It’s all research, nothing more.”

“Great Helix,” Verid exclaimed “You thought you could get away with that?”

“Why not?” said Flors. “We’ve earned off of Bronze Sky for centuries. Why didn’t Sharers object to that?”

“They found out too late,” Hyen observed quietly. “It shook them too much.”

She could see that. By their own reasoning, the Sharers shared the responsibility for what they had failed to prevent—the annihilation of a living world. They were too shocked to face it in full. “Well now, they’ve had eight generations to face up to it; and they’ve got a chance to prevent the next one. Green-eyed flies in Papilion are nothing compared to what’s coming.”

“Preposterous,” exclaimed Flors. “Look, you know what the L’liite rescheduling just cost us; the banks will be hurting for decades. They badly need healthy assets. How can we afford to give up such a source of revenue? Your own mate made her fortune off Bronze Sky.”

Accustomed to envy of Iras’s wealth, Verid did not rise to the bait. But if Iras had a finger in the Solaris deal, there would be trouble.

“You’re right, Flors,” said Hyen. “We need the white hole contracts. How unfortunate the deal leaked.”

Flors put his hands on the edge of the mooncurve and half rose from his seat. “I tell you, nobody else knew about it.” He looked more agitated than she had ever seen him. “Bank Helicon never leaks. The Solarians took the contract and jumped Fold the same day. The L’liites I informed only in general terms.”

“The Sharers had an authentic copy of the contract.” Verid had seen it, to her astonishment.

“No one had access to it.”

She could see that Hyen did not believe him, and she did not either. Foreign Affairs had had leaks before, although rarely one which involved an official document.

“That leaves us in a tight spot, doesn’t it.” Hyen sighed. “You’ve authorized a contract that can’t be undone,” he told Flors, “in direct violation of our treaty.” The “you” was emphasized. Hyen had carefully kept his own name off the contract. “I’m afraid, shonsib, that I will most regretfully accept your resignation.”

So Flors would take the fall. Under other circumstances, Verid would have rejoiced. But now, left alone to defend the terraforming scheme before an ocean of hostile Sharers... she envied Flors.

Iras swore she knew nothing of the deal. “I’d never touch terraforming—too high risk.”

“It’s illegal, damn it,” Verid grumbled, only half-satisfied. “Never mind the risk.”

“It’s not illegal to lend to Solarians. It was dumb to put the rest in writing. Anyway, I told them I’d have no part of it.”

“You mean they approached you? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well you always say, dear, we have to keep our business separate.”

That was true enough, Verid agreed ruefully.

For the rest of the day, she got hold of one Sharer affairs expert after another. She even reached Draeg, the purple L’liite at his lab.

“Can you help us?” she urged him. “You attend the Gathering. You know why we have to terraform. Your own home world will have to send people somewhere.”

Draeg’s dusky features wore an uncomfortable look. Understandably so, she thought; a typical foreign worker, he was not exactly used to pleas for help from an Elysian Subguardian. “What can I do?” he asked guardedly.

“Speak for us in the Gathering,” she said. “Try to help them see our case.”

His lips tightened, and the muscles shifted in his neck. She could sense an internal struggle in the man. “Sharing works both ways,” he muttered. “I begin to see their point. What good is it for us L’liites to make so many people that we have to ship them off? Instead of damming rivers, why don’t you make your loans to the little people, to better themselves so they don’t need extra children just to put them to work? So long as there are worlds to terraform, L’li will stay poor.”

His frankness startled her. She agreed with him, to a point, but that was no help now.

She returned to Kshiri-el, to catch Leresha once more before the third sundown. “We need time,” she pleaded. “However you found out, this has all been too sudden. Just share some time with us—until the next World Gathering. We’ll work something out, I promise.”

Leresha barely looked at her. The tangled scars that lined her body seemed to close her off, like a nascent butterfly in its chrysalis. “There is nothing to work out.”

Verid watched her searchingly. She had known Leresha since before she took her selfname—even before the smooth-complexioned youngster had dived into the nest of fleshborers. “You know me, Leresha. Your mother and grandmother knew me. I defended the right of your ancestors to share a fugitive from Elysium’s highest law.” She paused. “A year, now, will give me time. Elysians are proud to live on a world with a native ecosphere. We can seek alternatives. The ‘contract’ can be ‘renegotiated.’ But we need time.”

“Time,” repeated Leresha bitterly. “Time is something you Elysians have plenty of. What do you do with it? With ten times our lifetime, are you ten times as wise?”

For that there was no answer. The wind shrieked across the raft, scattering fallen raftblossoms in its path. “You haven’t answered my questions, either,” Verid reminded her. “Sharers and Elysians, we both need each other.”

Leresha looked past her. “It would be better that our people shared an ending, than that another world should die.”

Stunned, Verid had nothing left to say. She walked slowly back upraft, toward the shuttle.

As she plodded along the mossy raft trunk, three little Sharer children came romping over. The sight of children instantly stripped away centuries, bringing back her decades as generen. She smiled involuntarily. Sharer children looked so funny, with their outsized webbed feet. Turning their heads backward, they shrieked and laughed at something. Verid remembered how Iras longed for a child; odd, for Iras had never cared much for all Verid’s hundred-odd shonlings before.

The object of the children’s laughter clambered after them, over the raft branch. It was a trainsweep.

Verid froze in her tracks, suddenly struck with dread. Sharers and servos—an unlikely connection, and yet... That had been next on her list to take up with Leresha, and now it would be impossible. Just how much contact did the servos have?

A thought occurred to her. Casually she approached the children, stopping as their path crossed hers. “That’s quite a pet you share, sister,” she called out to the tallest of the girls.

“Yes, yes!” the girl cried out happily; she must have been eight or nine.

Verid nodded at the trainsweep, unsure what to call it in Sharer. “I never heard of such a thing—a creature made of non-life, coming to play with Sharers! Does it happen often?”

The girl stopped to think. “Not often. This one came to stay with us, but then she went home with Hawktalon. Now she’s come back to play with us again, while Hawktalon awaits her baby sister.”

Of course, it was Raincloud’s trainsweep. She recognized the crayon markings of Raincloud’s children. She sighed with relief; perhaps that was the end of it after all.

Then another girl leaped up, waving her fingers until the webs flashed. “She had a visitor once, you know! A visitor made of non-life! Remember, sister?”

“Oh yes,” said the older one. “The visitor walked tall like a person, but her legs were stiff, and she wore a painted face, like this.” She pulled the corners of her mouth into a wide grin and leered comically at the others, who burst into giggles once more.

A nana, Verid instantly recognized. Nanas, the most advanced and dangerous of servos; and the saddest to treat like servos. Somehow a nana had learned that the Sharers had harbored a fugitive trainsweep. Yet how could a nana get out here, all alone? No generen would allow it....

Except for Kal.

Raincloud’s labor had continued for twelve hours. The pain was not particularly bad, and the contractions came with no orderly pattern like the one Blackbear’s medical text described; now a dozen minutes between, then six, then back to nine or ten. ‘Tm always irregular,” she warned the lifeshaper.

Yshri the Foolish One, with her bald head and oval face, gave her a puzzled look. “Why should you share any greater regularity than the swell of the ocean?”

Raincloud grinned back appreciatively. They were outside, now, in the protective shadow of the silkhouse, the ocean purring beneath the afternoon sun. The lifeshaper applied living green tendrils which twined around her belly; their secretions dulled the pain without diminishing the force of her tightening.

Raincloud gripped Blackbear’s hand and smiled at Hawktalon, who sat cross-legged on the raftmoss, holding a statuette of the Dark One. She missed her mother and sisters, who would have joined her chanting the sacred texts of Mu, celebrating the great mystery of creation.

But the Sharers celebrated too, in their own way. From Yshri’s silkhouse, and from Leresha’s, their sisters collected as the day wore on. The unclothed purple women gathered around her with their flutes and whorlshell horns. They played songs and riddles and shared tales of babies born long ago, entertaining Hawktalon and Sunflower while Raincloud focused on the tightening universe within.

Blackbear watched her as she paced on the raft branch to help gravity do its work. The sea was lively today, and at times great bursts of spray reached her, bringing welcome relief. For a moment she stopped to rest and catch breath, admiring the piercing blue of Shora’s sky. “You didn’t believe it at first,” she reminded him. “You thought it was the wrong planet.”

“I still wonder,” he admitted.

She laughed quietly, then took a breath as the tightening came on again.

The transition came, with shuddering swiftness, a rising wall of pain that she could only push through, over and over. For an interminable time it seemed that nothing else existed, not even Blackbear’s eyes and the hypnotic voice of the lifeshaper. But the head of the child inside, that she could feel, tunneling out to daylight.

A cry burst the air, a short gasp of a cry, and a little wrinkled creature flung out its arms and legs. Then the infant was in Blackbear’s arms. He wrapped it in the blanket, the same one that had once wrapped Hawktalon, and then Sunflower. Cradling the infant for a moment, he laid it upon her to find her breast. What a thrill to feel one suck again, for she missed nursing Sunny.

“It’s a girl,” Blackbear whispered, as the lifeshaper had not seemed to notice. “What good luck for the clan!”

The lifeshaper apologized, “Sorry about the transition. Some pain is needed, to draw out the little sharer. Otherwise, you’d never let her out.”

“You’re right, I’ll miss her in there,” Raincloud said half-seriously. “But how much better to see her...”

From several feet off came Hawktalon’s voice. “Where’s Mother? Where’s my baby?” She came over and peered at her new sister. “Ooh, she’s little. She’s even uglier than Sunny was.”

“Hawktalon,” said Blackbear reprovingly. The infant’s head was rather flattened, and her nose was pushed to one side. Her skin was pallid, for the rich darkness of Clicker skin would only come later. But for Raincloud, all of these features became in an instant the highest standard of beauty.

Sunflower pushed his face eagerly beneath Raincloud’s arm. “It’s my baby,” he insisted. “When can I have my baby?”

“Does she have a name yet?” Blackbear ventured to ask.

Raincloud tried to recall her last dreams as she caressed Sunflower’s hair, for a moment overcome by the sense of the two little furry heads on her breast. Then her face wrinkled. “You know what I dreamed of? That trainsweep, clambering over the raft. We can’t very well call her that.”

“‘Trainsweep!’” Hawktalon exclaimed. “What a name!”

“Anything else?” asked Blackbear.

She thought hard, dazed with exhaustion. “The sky was blue, and the sound of the wind was in my ears. Blueskywind.” She heard Blackbear catch his breath. It was a good name for the Windclan, and yet different, for few Clickers ever came to light beneath a blue sky.

Beyond them the sea gasped against the raft, enveloping everyone with a fine mist. Yshri said, “Now the sea has named her too.”

Chapter 17

For the next day she rested, awaking only to feed the little one, and herself. During the day, she occasionally let her rock to sleep in a shon: a cradle that floated in a bed of water, swaying as the baby moved. At other times Blackbear hoisted the baby up into a leather pouch secure on his chest. A true rei-gi expert would be able to deflect any attacker while keeping the child safe.

Verid came to pay Raincloud and her newborn a visit.

“It’s good to see you, Subguardian.” Raincloud felt a bit nervous, for her milk was coming in, and her breasts leaked beneath her clothes.

Verid took up the newborn, handling her with surprising ease; a former generen, after all. Blueskywind’s head had rounded up beautifully, and her nose was beginning to spring back. “How alert she is,” Verid said. “Wait till Iras sees her.”

A particularly big wave crashed upon the raft, and the surface shifted beneath their feet. “The ocean’s getting rough,” Verid added. “The shuttle will take us out before the storm.”

“That’s okay; we told Yshri we’d stay on.” The Sharers knew what they were doing, she figured.

“You’ve heard, about the witnessers in Helicon?” Verid asked.

“I’ve heard nothing since yesterday,” said Raincloud.

“Sharer witnessers have appeared outside the Nucleus in whitetrance, in the middle of the main thoroughfare. If we don’t work something out, there will soon be more.”

Raincloud nodded. “It’s a shame.”

“Disastrous,” Verid exclaimed. “Absolutely disastrous.”

She nodded again, although Verid’s reaction seemed a bit extreme, she thought. Diplomacy would sort things out.

“Well, never mind, dear; you did your best. The fault was on my end.” Verid set Blueskywind back in her water cradle, but the infant cried out and waved her little cupped hands, until Raincloud took her up on her shoulder.

Raincloud managed a wan smile. She had long known, of course, what Bronze Sky’s Sharer delegates thought of terraforming; but for her, it had been ancient history, just a part of life’s impermanence. “I wish I could do more.”

“You need to rest. I’ll deal with Leresha and Ooruwen myself, tonight, for all the good it will do. If only I could address the Gathering myself...” Verid shook her head.

“I’ll be back to the Nucleus soon. I’ll have to bring the baby in from now on.” The baby would need to nurse.

“That’s fine. We can even borrow a nana for you.”

Raincloud shuddered. “No thanks.”

Verid drew nearer and sat on the floor next to the silken mat where Raincloud lay. Her eyebrows arched expressively. “There is one thing you can do for us. It’s highly classified, you understand.”

She looked up. “Yes?”

“Zheron is back. He wants us to visit the new Imperator, as soon as possible. He’s serious; he’ll even let us tag their missiles, do you see?”

Raincloud lay back and closed her eyes. The image of her teacher filled her brain with longing, while the newborn slept trustingly on her shoulder. Whom do I owe more, she wondered; a dead teacher, or a suckling child with a life ahead of her? Do I dare bring her to that cursed planet?

But there were newborns on that world too, and mothers weak with hunger.

“We need you,” Verid insisted. “We’ve got to know what we’re doing, to make the right moves. Zheron wants you; he called you a ‘man of honor.’”

She smiled despite herself, then grew serious. I’ll have to tell Blackbear.” She could foresee the explosion.

Verid hesitated. “Very well, but discuss it here—never in Helicon.”

“I’ll expect another raise,” she added, practical as always.

“Of course.”

“And I’ll need six months to train in high gravity.”

Verid gave her a quizzical look.

“Well, what do you think they’ll expect from of a ‘man of honor’?”

The ocean grew mountainous, its waves leaving deep troughs that exposed the coral-encrusted underside of the outer raft branches. By nightfall the storm struck, a furious tumult of wind that built waves nearly tall as the Caldera Hills.

The Sharers all moved down to their tunnels at the heart of the raft, sealing off the upper entrance from the silkhouse. For hours the ocean rocked them to and fro, like a giant shona. The Clicker children huddled between Raincloud and Blackbear, Sunflower’s eyes wide, with his thumb in his mouth. The Sharers took the opportunity for a marathon recounting of their most ancient tales. But Raincloud’s newborn slept like the dead, rousing only for an occasional sip at her breast, where the clear substance was gradually turning to milk.

When at last the motion quieted and the Sharers climbed out again, all their silkhouses had been washed away. Stunned, Raincloud and Blackbear sought in vain for the few clothes and toiletries they had forgotten to take down. It was as bad as a springtime mudslide in Tumbling Rock.

But the Sharers immediately began hauling new panels of seasilk out from storage below, and set to work twisting and lashing them together. Now Raincloud understood the feel of impermanence about the silken dwellings, and the reason why Sharers spent so much of their time at their looms weaving seasilk. Blackbear, who was handy at that sort of thing, immediately joined in.

“Share the day,” Yshri greeted her. “Your little one looks well. Eating greedily as a legfish, I expect.”

“Yes,” Raincloud admitted proudly, holding up Blueskywind’s head carefully as she overlooked her mother’s shoulder, alert and wakeful.

“Share wisely,” Yshri warned. “It’s not easy, raising a devil to learn goodness.”

Raincloud considered this. “You’re right. She won’t have it easy either, raising me.”

Yshri laughed. “I think she’ll do well enough. She’ll have good help,” she pointed out, nodding to Hawktalon, who had Sunflower by the hand, tugging him away from the water’s edge. “Will she take you to the Gathering tonight?”

Startled, Raincloud looked up.

“You have shared life-threat with us thrice over,” Yshri pointed out. “You shared a fugitive with us in swallower season; shared birth with a child; and stayed through the storm to share rebuilding. Your presence tonight would bring the deepest honor.”

The sky was cloudless, as black as the pupil of an eye. Yet the stars shone sharp as pinpoints, piercing the blackness down to the horizon. A moment’s slip of gravity, she imagined, would be enough to let her fall off into the void.

Beneath the sky sat the Sharers, each with her plantlight glowing softly before her crossed feet. When the greenish glow grew dim, a carafe of water was passed along to revive the plant. The light etched their faces in sharp relief, and their oval heads cast long shadows.

Across the Gathering, a plantlight was lifted overhead. The Sharer rose, a tall one, thin as a reed. “Those Elysians,” she said, “give them a chance and they will breed like snails.” The “chance” she referred to was of course Blackbear’s genome project. “They have no sense of the Web. We should have shared a stronger message, Yshri.”

“That’s right,” agreed another voice nearby. Her face had a prominent chin; Raincloud recognized her as Yshri’s lovesharer. “They have no business raising their own children. You know how it is, Yshri. Children are seductive: once you have one, you can’t help wanting more.”

“By next year,” said a third, “you’ll change your mind, and the Gathering can act. But then it may be too late.”

Her infant asleep in her arms, Raincloud listened with surprise. Leresha had said the Gathering was “divided,” implying a more or less equal division. In fact, however, all but Yshri opposed the genome project; they did not want Elysian individuals to raise their own children. For Sharers, one vote was as good as a majority, but for the Elysians, Raincloud knew, it would be small comfort.

Yshri at last replied, somewhat defensively. “The Elysians care well enough for Shora,” said the lifeshaper. “They clean up their wastes, offer food for fish, and share work with Sharers. They manage their own numbers better than we do. We Sharers actually produce surplus population now, as some of our children migrate to other worlds.”

Voices stirred nearby, and several plantlights lifted. The convener of the Gathering, a woman several months pregnant, held her light out toward one.

“A shocking state of affairs. We should not produce children who add to the surplus population of other worlds.”

“But we can’t manage all the webs of the universe. It’s more than enough for us to share our own, the Web of Shora.”

“Foolish One—we’re long past that. There is only one Web of life in the entire universe. All worlds are connected. Compassion anywhere breeds caring everywhere.”

“Don’t forget why we shared learning with the Heliconians in the first place. They protect us from other worlds whose people behave like fleshborers. We could be consumed by them.”

“But now our trust is broken.”

“Yes, we have shared breaking faith with them,” agreed Ooruwen, whose voice Raincloud recognized. “Not for the first time, either. Well, it’s our duty to repair the breach. So let’s get on with it. Let’s remind them who keeps this world habitable. Let’s share those beautiful green-eyed flies with the rest of their twelve city-rafts. Better yet, let the breathmicrobes color their skin.”

Raincloud smiled to herself. It was a Sharer principle only to take actions whose consequences they might willingly share. Nonetheless, those finicky Elysians would go crazy to see themselves turn purple in the mirror like Draeg.

“Not yet,” some one objected. “We have to share reason first, before we share flies and breathmicrobes. Elysians are capable of reason.”

“Exactly,” said Yshri’s lovesharer. “Let our witnessers do their work. Let the Elysians face into truth every moment of their days from now on. Who can withstand that?”

“Perhaps,” spoke Leresha suddenly, “it’s actually too late.” The voice of the wordweaver resonated differently, somehow, from the others. “Perhaps it’s too late for reason or breathmicrobes. We forget that humans throughout the Fold outnumber Sharers by a factor of ten thousand; and their numbers only grow.”

There was silence.

“Other worlds can hold more people than ours,” Yshri pointed out. “On other worlds people inhabit the land of the dead.” The Sharer term for “dry land” also meant “ocean floor” or “land of the dead.”

“But they overflow their land,” Leresha insisted, “crowding out even the dead. That is why they seek to ‘terraform,’ to colonize other dead lands.”

“So what can we do about that?” Yshri asked.

“What do we do when the snails overgrow the coral, consuming all and leaving nothing?”

“We shape a virus to deplete their numbers eightfold.”

The silence lasted longer this time. The distant waves groaned softly, and the scent of raftblossoms mingled with that of damp mosses.

“It could be done,” Yshri added dryly. “We could shape a virus to cut our own numbers by eight. Its disease would have a delayed onset, enabling it to spread across the Fold before it’s noticed.”

“What are you saying?” cried Ooruwen. “The Gathering ought to unspeak you. Humans are more than snails.”

Leresha said, “We are more dangerous.”

The next day, after Raincloud had slept, Verid insisted on hearing every word. She ought to have taped it, Raincloud thought wearily, but the treaty forbade that too. She had slept badly, slipping in and out of dreams that her memory did not catch.

“They can’t be serious, can they?” Raincloud asked. “It’s not like pacifists to make such... threats.”

“It was no empty threat,” Verid assured her. “The Sharers have always known how dangerous they are. The Valans were damned lucky they lost their war.”

“You think the Sharers really would loose a plague on us?”

“No,” said Verid. “Remember, they’d have to let the plague infect themselves, too. One might propose it—knowing the rest would be too sensible.”

Recalling the pull of Leresha’s voice in the night, Raincloud shuddered. “One wordweaver might persuade the rest.”

“Yes,” Verid admitted, as if this were just another possibility to consider.

“But—but this is horrible. What are we going to do about it?”

“The World Gathering is done, for this year,” Verid pointed out. “They’ll all be off to their home rafts. For now, I’ll head back to the Nucleus. I have other worlds to deal with, you know.”

Dazed, Blackbear sank onto the mat of seasilk. From outside arose a haunting song interwoven with a flute melody. The Sharers were singing their traditional thanks to the ocean for providing their evening meal. “So now you tell me those Elysians have managed to start a ‘war’ with the Sharers?”

“At least it’s a peaceful war—on both sides.” She hoped.

“And they still plan to take you to Urulan? With our baby?” he pointed out, for the nursing infant could not be left behind.

“They have lots of worlds to deal with.”

“I wish we’d never left Tumbling Rock,” he exclaimed suddenly. “Everything’s mixed up. Why don’t we just go home?”

Raincloud watched Blueskywind, who was gazing up at her as she nursed. She did not like to admit how unsettled she felt.

“Those Sharers,” he added suddenly. “They are thoroughly mad.”

“No they’re not,” Raincloud assured him. “That’s just the point; they’re not mad. They just see that the rest of us are.”

Blackbear looked unconvinced.

“You’ll see. I’ll read you the next part of The Web.”

The Web Part II

The sun was getting high above the gathering place, so the four of us took shade within a clump of treeferns along the eastern edge of the rim. Weia and Adeisha looked expectantly to Merwen, while I sat apart. Merwen then took up the task we had demanded, though it might drive us to madness: to find compassion in the Web.

“Cassi,” Merwen asked, “why do living things exist in a web of life, instead of in isolation?”

Before I could answer, Weia said, “Living things are food for others.”

“Living things need others,” said Adeisha, her dark hair lifting in the breeze, like mine. “Plants make food out of sun and minerals; but whence come the minerals, if not from the waste of animals?”

“Just so,” said Merwen. “Does each kind of living thing have its calling, then, its service to the others... its strand of the Web?”

“The legfish consumes plants and puts out rich wastes,” said Adeisha. “The fanwing consumes the legfish...”

“And we consume legfish,” said Weia. Some of us do, I amended silently. For Merwen ate only plants.

“Are some callings, some strands of the Web, more important than others?” Merwen asked. “Those of the larger, hungrier creatures, perhaps?”

Adeisha shook her head. “The microbes fix nitrogen to make protein; not even plants could get on without them. And the fungi scavenge dead flesh, returning its nutrients to the Web. Their role is central.”

“Then perhaps only the smallest strands are essential,” said Merwen. “Are the little ones all that’s really needed? Perhaps the Web could get on without legfish and fanwings.”

“Or Sharers,” added Weia.

“Or Sharers,” Merwen agreed.

Adeisha considered this. “After a fashion, yes; but it would be a duller, poorer Web. Some moss-fungi would die out without dead meat to feed upon.” The colorful moss-fungi were much admired by Sharer artists.

“So then,” said Merwen, “all creatures, even we Sharers in the end, give our bodies to the ocean to feed the fungi.”

“Unwillingly,” Weia pointed out.

“Unwillingly, in most cases. But, as Adeisha said before, deeds count more than intentions.”

“Yes,” said Adeisha. “However long we strive for life, we all expect to end our days on the ocean floor. But—that’s just what the Heliconians would prevent,” she added excitedly.

Merwen waved a hand, as if the Heliconians and their plans were of small consequence. “The four of us, here, have now spun a Web of the purest form. Each sharer, be it animal, plant or microbe, or even Sharer, serves all the rest, unremittingly, without reserve. What more could one ask? What greater compassion could be imagined?”

Weia laughed and squeezed Adeisha’s hand. “Surely you won’t let her leave it at that, Shortsighted One.”

Adeisha said carefully, “There is a lot of pain in this Web, the pain of things preyed upon, parasitized, starved. There is more pain than the most compassionate lifeshaper can even begin to share.”

“The Web you describe is for fish,” I objected suddenly, “not for humans.”

Merwen’s head turned toward me, and the scar wrinkled on her neck. “How do humans change the Web?”

I hesitated, reluctant to speak.

“Humans generate compassion,” said Adeisha. “That is our deepest calling.”

“Humans make ‘war,’” I said. The word for “war,” literally, “the great deathhastening,” had been unknown to Sharers before the Valan invasion. “They make ‘war’ with each other, and with the Web, until it is destroyed.”

“No, Cassi,” said Weia, “this thing called ‘war’ was invented by sick ones, not healthy humans.”

This angered me, and Merwen said, “Even Sharers contain the seeds of ‘war.’ My own scars were not caused by Valans.”

“But that seed has never spread, and never will,” insisted Adeisha. “How could it? How could a Sharer Gathering ever make ‘war’ upon an insect, let alone other humans?”

Merwen did not answer this. Instead she asked, “Can you say what is the most central quality that makes humans different from other strands of the Web? The quality that makes possible compassion, as well as deathhastening?”

“Knowing,” said Adeisha. “The faculty of knowing things, knowing about things, sets humans apart. But I agree with Weia: No human who knows better would invent ‘war,’ so ‘war’ is not truly human.”

Merwen said, “So humans are ‘creatures that know’ about the Web. We’ll soon see what that means. But first, before this ‘creature that knows’ can be seen within the Web, we must dive more deeply and share a fundamental truth: indeed, the most shameful truth about the Web.”

“How can truth be shameful?” Adeisha objected.

“Better shameful truth than noble lies,” said I.

Merwen flashed a smile. “All truth shames the learner; that’s the attraction in it. Shame brings blood to the face, and elsewhere.”

“Be serious,” Adeisha insisted. “Shameful or not, what is this truth about our humans in the Web?”

“The truth is that all of us, even the most compassionate, feed on other life, cutting short thousands of individual lives.”

Adeisha hesitated. “Yes, but we agreed that’s part of the Web. The fish we eat may have eyes, but they cannot know themselves in the mirror.” The Sharer definition of a human is one who recognizes herself in her reflection.

“Sharers eat fish,” Merwen observed, although she herself abstained from fish and other flesh. “Valans eat ‘monkeys.’ Have you ever seen one? A ‘monkey’ may recognize herself in the mirror, although she cannot write or calculate as we do.”

“Then these, ‘monkeys,’ too, are human, only differently able. Our Gathering would share care of them,” said Adeisha.

“Excellent,” Merwen told her granddaughter. “The monkeys are human. Now, about the fish again: What do you know about fish?”

“It is well known that a fish sees in the mirror just another competitor.”

“Why is the mirror so important? What do fish feel about being eaten, never mind the mirror?”

At this, Adeisha and Weia both stirred uneasily, sensing a heresy, something “new and evil.” Weia muttered, “Of course the mirror is important. A human sees herself in it; and the fullest human, the one ready to join the Gathering, sees not just herself, but every human being that ever lived.”

“Every human being? Even those who never saw a mirror?”

“Even those unfortunate ones,” said Adeisha.

“Why not fish, too?”

There was a short silence.

“What do fish feel?” Merwen repeated, “And what is our response? To avoid causing pain, whoever feels the pain—isn’t this the first duty of the Compassionate One?”

“So,” Adeisha replied reluctantly, “this is why you don’t eat fish. Very well, then; we can get along without eating fish, or crabs or snails, or any creature that has eyes and might feel pain.”

Weia laughed. “Wait till you propose that to the Gathering.”

I smiled, thinking of the nets full of fish we all had consumed at the festival.

“Nevertheless,” said Adeisha, “it would be possible. The Gatherings have accepted stranger things—even my ‘father,’ a malefreak from Valedon. Let’s not eat fish.”

“A male,” corrected Merwen, preferring a less loaded reference to the sex absent among Sharers except for the Valan emigrant who had become Adeisha’s father. “Males, too, have their place in the Web. Now that we’re not eating fish, what about plants? Surely seaweed objects to being chewed between your jaws.”

“Shora,” exclaimed Adeisha, “seaweed has no eyes nor central nervous system. Seaweed can’t feel pain.”

“How can you be sure? Seaweed collects light throughout its body, just like eyes. Some seaweeds make thorns or collect poisons, precisely to avoid grazers.”

“Nonsense,” said Weia firmly. “Plants can’t feel.”

“Is feeling a kind of skill, something that must be learnshared? Do poorly raised children lose the ability to feel?”

“As you say,” replied Adeisha.

“Well then,” said Merwen, “even if our plants can’t feel, they might be human, just differently able.”

Chagrined, Adeisha winced to think of it. “We might give up eating plants,” she decided, “and even fungi, since that’s who you’ll argue for next. We could lifeshape our digestive tracts to oxidize sulfur, iron, and uranium, the way microbes do.”

“Sulfur, iron, and uranium!” cried Weia. “How absurd!”

“She warned us,” Adeisha conceded. “Loving all and eating none—our Compassionate One seems to be a microbe. Well, I haven’t gone mad yet. In the name of compassion, I’ll eat sulfur and iron. I draw the line at uranium, though. What next?”

“You haven’t gone mad,” agreed Merwen admiringly. “And you’ve only one thing left to give up eating.”

“Just one! What a relief,” said Adeisha. “Hurry up, what’s left?”

“Your future children.”

At that, Adeisha fell silent, her lips parted. The wind from the ocean climbed the rim, keening over us.

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said haltingly.

“I’m not sure I want to,” muttered Weia.

“Adeisha,” Merwen asked, “what is the first duty of the Gathering, with respect to our future children?”

“The Gathering decides how many children are to be conceived,” Adeisha explained, “and by whom. The lifeshaper then collects ova from the pair of lovesharers. The ova are fused and their chromosomes modified, then returned to the one who shall bear the child.”

“How many children might a woman bear over a lifetime, if unregulated by the Gathering?”

“A lifetime? Goodness—some ten or twenty, perhaps, if the seaswallower spared her.”

“What becomes of the ova that would have made those children?”

“They die, along with most of the hundred thousand produced to begin with.”

“But she chooses to let die these ten or twenty ova, her future children.”

Adeisha did not answer, but Weia exclaimed, “Nonsense, Mother. Everyone knows that human life begins at fusion of the ova, in the place of lifeshaping, not before.”

“Is this a thing we know,” asked Merwen, “or only a thing we tell our children, those we let live? One of Cassi’s noble lies?”

“It’s only common sense,” said Weia. “Twenty children apiece would crowd and starve each other out in no time.”

“As I said, we eat our future children, in the name of the Web. We don’t see them in the mirror; though some claim to, in whitetrance.”

Adeisha now had a haunted look about her eyes, and the tendons stood out in her neck. “You are calling lies everything we teach our children—that life begins in the place of lifeshaping; that the Sharer sees herself and all others in the mirror; that Shora Herself placed Sharers in the Web as gentle guardians of its living pattern.”

“Unspeak her, Adeisha,” proposed Weia sympathetically. “You would scarcely be the first to unspeak my mothersister.”

A ghost of a smile passed Merwen’s lips. “I did not call them lies,” she told Adeisha, “I only asked questions. Weia is right: Those are good rules for children. And the child is central within us all.”

“All right,” sighed Adeisha, “I’ve now gone completely mad. What next? Do we eat our present children, too?”

“As I said, Weia’s rules are good ones. To be shamed is no excuse for shamelessness.”

“Thanks, Mother,” said Weia. “Is it possible that you intend to complete your weaving of this Web with my simple rules?”

“Surely not,” said Adeisha, “with us madwomen at large. Is compassion no more than a handful of rules?”

Merwen held up her hands. “All right, all right; we’ll ascend from the depths to rescue compassion. Though, having heard your threat of unspeech, I hesitate to think what fate you’ll choose for me next when you hear what’s to come.”

At this I laughed. “Never fear,” I said, “we won’t unspeak you. I for one will share your fate, whatever it is.”

“Thanks, Cassi,” said Merwen. “A fate shared with you would be worth embracing.”

At that my face grew warm.

“Well, then,” said Merwen. “Suppose compassion is not a perfect, unchanging element of the universe, like iron or sulfur. It is imperfect and approximate, perhaps even inconsistent.”

“Agreed,” said Adeisha. “Compassion is a living thing.”

“Then it requires conception, gestation—and birth. Compassion will now be born, in three waves of contraction.”

“All right.”

“First, we have seen how the Web interweaves its strands of compassion and consumption inextricably, like the orbital and radial lines of a clickfly web.”

“Yes, like that,” Adeisha agreed.

“Then human compassion will always require choice, difficult choices at that. Difficult choices require good learnsharing.” That is, “learning,” or “teaching.” “And good learnsharing requires good teacher/learners.”

“Who will make the best teacher/learner?” asked Adeisha.

“The infant,” answered Merwen. “The infant, the most wicked and recalcitrant creature, has the most to learn, and the most to teach about compassion. From conception, the infant requires infinite care of her mother. But the form of the infant, her large eyes, round head, even the sweet scent of her scalp, elicits universal delight from caresharers. And the sharing of milk rewards the mother as sweetly as lovemaking.”

“The infant teaches compassion—and tests it,” added Weia.

“Yes, yes,” said Adeisha. “In our best Web, let all Sharers spend as much time as possible sharing care of infants. In this way, they will learn the good of compassion.”

“And let every Sharer bear and nurse a child at least once in her lifetime,” Merwen went on. “By containing that little kicking fish inside her for nine months, she will learn compassion for the Web itself, which encompasses so many kicking creatures.”

“What if some are more fit to mother children than others?” Weia asked. “Just as some are suited to fishing, others to lifeshaping?”

“Some children are better suited to having mothers than others. Yet each child must have one.”

Then I asked, “What about males? You said that males, too, could share the Web.”

Merwen nodded. “Can males be Sharers of the Web?”

“My ‘father’ is,” Adeisha promptly replied. “But in general, it’s agreed that males are inferior to females and have difficulty becoming Sharers.”

“Inferior in all respects?”

“Not at all,” I objected. “Males equal us in most respects; intelligence, fortitude, and so on. Of course, in both sexes, individuals may be better or worse.”

Adeisha said, “Males are incapable of childbirth, which is precisely what’s needed.”

“Exactly,” said Merwen. “So, the childbearing ability must be shared with men. You’re the lifeshaper. Can this be done?”

Adeisha considered this. “It could be done. Although, for future children, the simplest remedy would be to eliminate the Y chromosome, which carries few genes anyway. Why make any more males?”

“So all our male ‘future children’ are to be ‘eaten,’” observed Merwen ironically. “But the Web needs diversity. To exclude a chromosome, even a small one, from our gene pool would be a mistake.”

“You’re right,” Adeisha agreed.

“Once males can bear infants and share milk,” Merwen said, “their minds will turn away from ‘war,’ the one act which appears as momentous as childbirth. This is the ‘first wave’ that I promised.”

“But Sharers, too, share the seeds of ‘war,’” I reminded her.

“You’re right,” said Merwen. “Our first wave was a small one. Now the next. If males can become Sharers, what of other creatures?”

Weia eyed her doubtfully. “Surely, Mother, you won’t tell us fish can learnshare compassion?”

“Microbes learned compassion long before fish. Microbes made the first environment that greater creatures could dwell in.”

“Yes,” said Adeisha. “Even disease-causing microbes evolve into forms which spare their host and hence survive better. The species most advanced in evolution are the symbionts.”

“The origin of species,” said Merwen, “is the survival of the best sharer.”

“The best eater, you mean,” said Weia.

“That, too.” Merwen lifted a hand. “But humans are unique in this: We alone can knowingly choose which current to follow, sharing or eating.”

Weia said, “Then we can choose to eat fish.”

“What becomes of us, then, as we watch their eyes and cut off their heads?”

Adeisha shuddered. “Fish might teach us, as infants do.”

“A fish is not an infant,” Weia insisted. “I eat fish, but I adore my Oolioo.”

“You’re right,” said Merwen. “But perhaps for that very reason, we might practice compassion on fish and other eyed creatures first.”

Adeisha asked, “How is that?”

“The child who learns to weave seasilk practices first with strands of weed. And the builder of silkhouses builds a toy house of sticks first. So, the Compassionate One will begin with fish.”

“But the lifeshaper, too, has to practice,” Adeisha pointed out. “She practices on plants and animals, first, before shaping humans.”

“The lifeshapers will have to come up with other ways. This is the ‘second wave’: To practice the skill of compassion, Sharers must learn not-killing of fish, crabs, insects, indeed all creatures that have eyes.”

“Not-killing,” I murmured, for the word was new to me.

“Remember,” said Merwen, “that ‘killing,’ that is, hastening death, is inescapable; for all living things will die, and all live by the death of others. But not-hastening, not-killing, is what shines like waterfire in a dark sea.”

Weia observed, “The Gatherings would never agree to do without fish.”

“They might,” offered Merwen, “if it could be shown to strengthen our Web against future invaders.”

“That is true,” said Adeisha. “Compassion overcame the Valan invaders; so, the deeper our compassion, the greater the security of our world.”

“Now,” said Merwen, “what shall we call the Sharers who choose to live by this new standard? Let’s call them Guardians, the Guardians of the true Web.”

“The Guardians,” said Adeisha approvingly. “All Sharers were meant to guard the Web and be guarded by it.”

“So these Guardians will share guarding,” said Merwen, “in the name of compassion, for the sake of all organisms, all strands of the Web.”

“Those Guardians themselves will need watching,” Weia warned, “It’s said, ‘guard none but the guardians.’”

“Exactly,” said Merwen. “That’s the ‘third wave.’ Who among these Guardians will rule and be ruled?”

No one answered.

“Among the Guardians,” Merwen went on, “surely a few will show special gifts of knowing: knowing of the wind and water, of the expanse of clickfly memories, of the ways of minds and hearts. Those of greatest insight will know how to sort compassion from consumption, in any given instance. Those who put their gifts into words will be called the most inspired, and the most dangerous.”

“Wordweavers,” I whispered with half a smile.

“The wordweavers!” Adeisha exclaimed. “Of course, the wordweavers have infinite insight, and can best teach the Gathering. The wordweavers must rule the Web.”

Merwen said, “Who knows better to rule, and desires it more, than the wordweaver? But beware—for the compassionate wordweaver will also be the most dangerous strand of the Web. She will be an extremist and a busybody, always trying to set to right things which might best be left alone.”

“Mothersister, that’s exactly what some in the Gathering say of you,” Weia told her wonderingly.

“Thank you,” said Merwen, accepting the compliment. “So this is the third wave: Wordweavers will rule the Web, but must always be ruled by the Gathering of Guardians, which takes no decision opposed by a single soul.”

“I don’t agree,” said Adeisha. “Since nothing seems forbidden just now, let me say that a few of our sisters in the Gathering are too foolish to be worth hearing, let alone stand in the way of wordweavers. As Guardians they would do no better. There must be some way to make decisions without them.”

“That, too, has been said of Mothersister,” Weia pointed out.

After a brief silence, Merwen said in a different tone, “For my part, I long to hear out the most foolish of our sisters.”

“All right then,” said Adeisha, “for your sake, we’ll let them speak. Let the wordweavers rule and be ruled.”

“By the Gathering,” Merwen concluded.

“So,” Adeisha summed up, “we are to learn compassion from infants, males, and microbes; we are to treat fish as Sharers; and let the wordweavers rule and be ruled. I’m convinced Shora will be the better for this! Weia, let’s bring this to the Gathering.”

Weia shrugged. “As you say. It’s worth a hearing.” In fact, she discounted most of the proposal; but, as a Sharer, she could hear out anything, knowing her own voice could never be overruled or voted down.

“Good luck,” said Merwen, as Adeisha and Weia arose to leave, casting long shadows into the hollow where the Gathering would meet that night in the glow of a hundred plantlights. “If you face a rough sea at the Gathering, don’t be discouraged. You can always weave this Web within your own soul and body. You’ve got all it takes—even the microbes.”

Adeisha’s laughter drifted off in the breeze.

I remained where I sat, pensively making marks with my finger in the moss.

“What’s left, Cassi?” Merwen asked, just loud enough for me to hear. “I can tell by your look, I must have gone far astray somewhere.”

I tried to speak, something which often comes hard to me, especially among Sharers. This time, it seemed the hardest ever.

“This imaginary Web,” I said at last. “Can any one person... weave it for herself?”

“I think so,” said Merwen. “Anyone can practice what we spoke of just now, if it seems wise. What do you think?”

“What if one person might be worth more than the entire Web of the universe? What if I said I’d see the whole Web destroyed, if one special person might be saved?” At that my pulse raced, for of course that’s how I felt about Merwen herself.

Merwen considered this. “We’ve assumed, so far, that this Web is good; perhaps the greatest good.”

“It is.”

“Then what you’ve proposed just now can only be evil.”

At that I was completely silenced.

“You are right to keep silence here,” said Merwen, “for the gathering hollow is hardly the place to propose evil. Let us leave here and swim out from the main raft, before we speak further.”

Section 3. The Dance Of Fire

Chapter 1

The Windclans returned to find their house in its usual friendly spirits. “I see you’ve generated another shonling,” it observed. “Be sure to have her registered.”

“Thanks for the reminder,” said Raincloud, letting Blueskywind down from the pouch at her chest. The pouch, made of goat hide, was especially designed to protect the infant’s head during a rei-gi move.

“And your visiting served well, I hope?” asked the house.

“Just great,” she said. “We ought to go out more often; the kids need to stretch their legs.”

“I agree,” said the house. “My visiting served well, too, and I hope to do this more often.”

Startled, Blackbear looked up and exchanged a look with Raincloud.

“Only under orders, I hope,” said Raincloud.

“Of course, Citizen.”

Blackbear added, “You’d better watch out, or Public Safety will come after you.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. If they do, I’ve made arrangements.”

They absorbed this. Then Raincloud shrugged. “I expect we’ll be out at least one day a week. Sunny—watch the baby’s head!”

Sunflower was doing his best to pull the sleeping baby out of her pouch. Blackbear hurried to help him. “You have to put your hand under the head, see. Babies can’t hold their heads up yet.”

“Why?” Sunflower asked, as his father placed Blueskywind into her sleeping basket.

“Because that’s how their neck muscles are made before birth,” he explained. “The head has to relax completely, to help the baby come out of the womb.”

“Why?”

This could go on for a while. “Look—just hold the head gently in your hand, like this.”

“Just-hold-the-head-gently-in-your-hand-like-this,” Sunflower repeated solemnly, with crisp clicking. The baby’s head with its black fuzz of hair leaned back precariously upon his chubby little palm, eyes and mouth tightly shut. Her face was darkening, although she still looked pale next to her older brother.

A powerful odor emanated from the kitchen. It smelled like rotting eggs. “What’s that, by the Goddess?” Blackbear demanded, holding his breath.

Hawktalon came running out of the kitchen. “Yuk, look what the kitchen made! I didn’t do it, I didn’t!”

In the kitchen, the servo window had produced a bowl full of what looked and certainly smelled like rotten eggs.

“Out with it!” Raincloud ordered with a theatrical gesture, holding her hand over her face. The eggs disappeared down the disposal, although their smell lingered. Doggie raced out of the kitchen and tore around the living room, apparently caught up in the excitement. “Hawk, that’s wasting food and it’s not funny.”

“I told you, I didn’t do it. How could I? The house doesn’t answer me.”

“That’s true,” Raincloud admitted. “Well, who did then?”

“Doggie did.”

They all looked at Doggie, who was still racing around the living room like a cornered cockroach.

“Doggie did?”

“She asked me, what was the most disgusting thing I ever saw?” Hawktalon had developed a lengthy “vocabulary” of servo-squeak, most of which Blackbear had assumed was imaginary. “I told her about the time back home when Daddy lost an egg in the back of the fridge. So she went right up to the window and told it to make some.”

“Good Goddess,” Blackbear muttered. “Whatever would she do that for?”

“She’s jealous of baby Trainsweep.” Hawktalon had persisted in calling the baby by the first name from Raincloud’s dream. “She told me, ‘Send Trainsweep back to the Sharers.’”

Blackbear felt his scalp prickle. They had been warned, after all, that the little servo might be dangerous. “Well you tell Doggie, we’ll send her back to the Sharers soon enough.”

“And you, House,” added Raincloud, “you’re to ignore trainsweep’s orders, too, from now on; just like shonlings. Understand? Or we’ll report your defect to sector whatever-the-number-is.”

“If you insist, Citizen.” The house voice carried an unusual note of reluctance.

From the basket came gasping cries, as Blueskywind awoke for a feeding. Raincloud shook her head. “It’s bad enough having three kids with minds of their own around here,” she muttered. “Now we have five.”

No wonder Doggie was jealous, for Blueskywind enchanted her family like a sorceress. Blackbear could think of nothing else but that little peach of a face, her tiny hands and feet wrinkled with loose skin and baby fat. Her grip was tenacious; even as she slept on his shoulder, she held a fistful of his sleeve in her determined grasp. Hawktalon was soon holding her in one arm like an expert, while Fruitbat lay discarded on the floor. She especially delighted to watch the fontanel, where the tough patch of skin between Blueskywind’s unclosed skull bones could be seen to pulse with each heartbeat.

But at last Blackbear and the older children and Doggie had to go back to the lab, while the baby went off to the Nucleus with her mother. “Hope they let her sleep,” Blackbear grumbled, still distrustful of the arrangement.

Raincloud laughed, as she bound the infant up securely in the pouch strapped from her chest to her hips. “I have a new office, now,” she reminded him. After the World Gathering, Raincloud had been promoted to Special Assistant and got an office with a built-in automatic diaper changer. Lem Inashon, too was promoted to Sub-Subguardian.

After she had confided her plans for Urulan, Blackbear no longer asked what she was up to. For now, though, the Sharers were her main concern. The Sharer witness against terraforming had spread to all twelve cities. The holo news showed them every night, usually a pair at a time seated cross-legged in the middle of the main thoroughfare, stark white and unclothed.

“Bye now,” said Raincloud. “Say ‘Bye-bye,’ Blue.”

The baby grimaced in her sleep.

“So long as your office doesn’t try to feed her, too,” Blackbear warned.

At the laboratory, change was in the wind. “We’re losing Onyx,” Tulle told Blackbear. “The House of Hyalite hired her to direct their share of the genome project. It was part of the deal.”

Blackbear nodded. “Good for her. It’s hard to imagine our lab without her.”

“You’re right. Besides being the sharpest embryo analyst I’ve had in decades, she gets along with everyone. Draeg is bright, but he and Lorl don’t even say hello.”

“At least he and Pirin agree on whom to hate.”

Tulle laughed and reached down to stroke the black hood of her capuchin. “Personalities. They’re the bane of a lab director’s existence. If only servos could do good research! But that would be much less fun,” she added hastily.

Blackbear was silent, regretting his own thoughtless remark. Of course most of the lab detested Kal, but he himself did not; in fact, he looked forward to finding the logen again sometime at the anaean garden.

“As for the Fertility Project,” Tulle added more quietly, “it looks like Onyx will take that with her.”

Puzzled, he asked, “You mean the genome project?”

“Fertility work—the whole field.” She averted her eyes for a moment, then faced him squarely. “The Guardians have pressed me, even my strongest supporters. They’re anxious to placate the Sharers any way they can. They want me to drop fertility, and stick to longevity.”

Blackbear’s mouth fell open. “But the Sharers did not agree. Some of them believe that Elysians should raise their own children.”

“The Guardians won’t listen. They’re scared stiff over the terraforming controversy, and they’ll grasp at anything.”

“Why should a couple of naked people in a street scare anyone?” he wondered.

The blond Elysian scientist looked thoughtful. “Suppose your ‘High Priestess’ were to sit in protest in the middle of Tumbling Rock.”

He shuddered. “That would be different.”

“Among Sharers, everyone’s a High Priestess.”

“But in Tumbling Rock, it would never happen. We would obey the High Priestess immediately.”

“Your people are a matriarchy,” Tulle pointed out. “Ours are a democracy, dealing with communitarian anarchists.”

“Does democracy guarantee bad management?”

“It sure looks that way, doesn’t it,” Tulle exclaimed with exasperation.

“You’ve fought so hard for the fertility work,” he insisted. “You can’t just give up.”

“I’m not giving up. I’m letting Onyx take the project out to Valedon, where it’s less controversial. She has to take something, after all. The genome approach is really the best we’ve come up with; and you made a real contribution. You should transfer to Valedon, too.”

“That would be hard, with Raincloud’s job here.”

“The moonferry’s not a bad commute. Of course, I’d be glad to keep you here. You could go back to that Eyeless gene. Most of its fertility regulators govern longevity, too. Several Eyeless alleles in the Elysian population start causing problems by the end of one’s first millennium.”

Just how common was this “premature aging,” he wondered.

The capuchin sprang up to his knee. It took to examining the lines of his hand with great care, as if a morsel of food might be hidden there. Another decade left, perhaps, yet this little soul had no thought of mortality.

With his project taken away, Blackbear felt lost and tired. He took two extra Visiting Days to catch up on sleep, for the baby still woke every night, and he made sure Hawktalon kept up with her homework. Hawktalon had developed the unnerving habit of conversing with Doggie as if she were a girlfriend who understood everything she said. Doggie responded in servo-squeak, her rhythms of expression echoing the girl’s.

As he rested, his sense of loss turned to anger. What right did those self-righteous Elysians have to take away the one project that might have ultimately benefited less fortunate foreigners?

Kal had won after all, he realized. By making their work a public issue, the logen had forced them to quit the basic research. Now, if the Valan venture failed, who would start from scratch again? And the news said that Kal had leaked the terraforming contract, too. Draeg had been right all along. Kal was dangerous and destructive.

The next afternoon, on his way home Blackbear stopped at the swallowtail garden as usual to let Sunflower and Hawktalon run a bit. The two children chased Doggie around the trees, while Blackbear sat on a mooncurve thinking how homesick he was. Quail would be getting ready for the Dance of Fire, the third great festival of the Clicker year. Actually, he realized, it was just over one standard year since the first day the Windclans had set foot on Helicon; but the Bronze Skyan Year would last another five months. The Dance of Fire celebrated the burning season, when great thunderstorms set fire to the oldest stands of forest, charring broad swaths to return their minerals to the earth. It was said that the Goddess Herself could be seen in the columns of black smoke with their uplifted fingers of flame.

Blackbear was about to call the children and depart, when he noticed an Anaean watching him. The man wore a brown talar, its pattern depicting fallen leaves in such profusion that he nearly blended into the scenery.

It was Kal—no longer in white, the mourning for his long-dead mate. Astonished and disconcerted, Blackbear took a step closer. “You’ve put off your mourning,” he blurted out.

Kal rose to meet him, with an air of hesitancy. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to be seen today. But now that you’re here,” he said, “you may as well do your worst.”

Blackbear frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I know how you feel. I look in on friends now and then,” Kal admitted with a smile.

He still tended to forget he was on display for much of the day. “Well, if you’re ashamed of yourself, you ought to be. You couldn’t have your way through the logathlon, but now those cowards in the Guard have given in.”

“The Guardians are cowards, I agree. As for myself, I gained nothing. Tulle was rather clever, I think. She retained both financial and consulting interests in the genome project, while placing its development effectively beyond my reach. Meanwhile, I suspect that the longevity problems hold greater scientific interest for her.”

That was true, he suddenly realized. What was more boring than to rearrange a few chromosomes? Besides, the fertility problem was really a matter of outsmarting human invention, whereas postmillennial longevity was an open frontier. “Well, little good that does me,” Blackbear exclaimed. “I came here to work on something for the good of my people—and now what’s left?”

“You’re right, and it’s all my fault. As I said, I didn’t want to be seen today.”

With difficulty Blackbear suppressed a laugh at this absurd confession. “And what about all the trouble you caused over terraforming? Telling the Sharers, without warning—”

“That’s not true.” Kal shook with agitation, and his voice rose. “I knew nothing about that. Of course, I don’t approve of terraforming; but I would never pass a stolen document behind Verid’s back. You must tell everyone, it’s not true.”

Blackbear stared at him, taken aback. “All right, then,” he muttered. “But what’s wrong with terraforming? You yourself said we’d have no choice, in a few decades.” He was starting to talk about time like an Elysian, he thought ruefully.

Kal sighed and looked away. He resumed his seat on the bench, and Blackbear followed, with a quick glance to locate Hawktalon and make sure Sunflower was not gobbling caterpillars. “It’s evil,” Kal said simply. “If anything is evil, to kill a world is.”

Blackbear tried to consider this idea, but somehow a cloud of fog obscured it. He knew his own existence, and the way of his people on Bronze Sky, to be good; and anything that existence necessitated could not be bad. He shook his head. “So what would you have us do?”

Kal did not answer. But he had answered already, on that night after the hearing when Blackbear had first confronted him.

“You want me to stop having children, let alone ageless ones,” Blackbear answered for him. His hands gripped the air, as if somehow to shape the indefinable. “What is life without a house full of children? Children are like stars with faces. Their play makes magic of the very dust on the floor.”

“I know,” said the former generen.

“It’s no use giving up children, anyway,” Blackbear exclaimed with sudden insight. “That is why Elysian consumption grows, despite their level population: to replace the children’s magic with adult toys.”

“You are right. But one has to start somewhere. It’s enough to live one’s life clinging to the edge of an abyss; one needn’t actually fall in.”

That was just what The Web said, Blackbear recalled.

From behind a tree Sunflower screeched as Hawktalon tried to pull him in one direction, according to whatever the game was. Blackbear started to rise, then gripped the seat to hold himself back. Sure enough, their cries subsided as the pair managed to resolve their difference. A sign of growing up. How quickly they would turn into adults and fly off with the butterflies.... A good thing he still had a baby in the house.

Blackbear remembered something else. “The Web says that everyone should raise a child.”

“Merwen said that,” Kal qualified. “The problem is, how to stop with one? Sharers, by the way, consider The Web a rather dangerous book.”

“Then why does everyone draw attention to it?”

“A good question.” Kal’s voice grew soft, with a singer’s control. “The Heliconian Doctors were much taken with The Web. That is why they called their leaders ‘Guardians,’ a crude translation of the Sharer term used in Merwen’s speech. And yet, when they built the shon, they followed Weia’s principle, that only a few were fit to be parents.”

Among Elysians, that might be true, Blackbear thought.

“At any rate,” Kal concluded, “dangerous or not, one is bound to become that which one fights. Therefore it’s wise to choose a worthy adversary.”

His face grew warm as he realized the implication.

Kal looked up. “I am sorry about your project. You worked so hard on it, and your hearing earlier this year was well done. I would have had nothing to say.”

Blackbear appreciated the compliment, although the thought of Kal without comment was an unlikely one. “I guess I’ll go back to the Eyeless gene,” he muttered. What am I doing here? He kept pushing that thought back into the fog. “It has interesting effects on longevity...” He looked up. “Just how common are ‘longevity defects,’ anyway? I can’t seem to find the stats.”

Kal thought a moment. “My guess is that aging will set in for most of us early in the second millennium.”

“Then aging isn’t prevented, really, only postponed.”

“Who knows? The oldest of us are barely a thousand yet. You’ll find it’s not a subject for polite conversation.”

He thought this over. “Do Elysians age just like we do? Develop wrinkles, and a weak heart, and so on?”

“It varies a lot. Some start to wrinkle, and within months they shrivel up like dried fruit, but their hearts remain strong. Others collapse suddenly of heart disease. Others lose muscle tone, gradually, until they’re left to subsist in virtual space.”

So that was it. “Immortality” was a hoax after all. Even Alin had told him as much. Still, he thought, one need not sneeze at a thousand years.

“There’s a special Palace of Health for them,” Kal added. “I visit there. If you like, I’ll take you along.”

Chapter 2

Raincloud enjoyed her comforts at the Nucleus. In her new office, with a higher security rating, she was free to put up her feet now and then, letting herself mend from the childbirth, while trying out new gadgets like the language analyzer. Blueskywind lay snug between her mother’s breasts, or slept in a little cradle that had molded itself out of the wall. An automatic sensor detected a soiled diaper; then servo “hands” snaked out to whisk it off and snap on a fresh one.

With her rise in status, assistants from other departments sent their mates to meet her, bearing gifts to be reciprocated by Blackbear’s embroidery. The baby made a sensation; some visitors gawked with undisguised astonishment, as if she had grown a fifth limb. A few snide remarks were heard about “wallowing like animals,” in reference to the nursing. Raincloud considered it beneath her notice, but Verid sent round a directive designating the infant an official part of their Sharer relations effort.

At this time, of course, Sharer relations needed all the help they could get. Leresha and Ooruwen sat in whitetrance outside the Nucleus, while others still purple stood by to attend them, all unclothed and unspeaking. The few Sharer delegates willing to talk addressed all their remarks to Raincloud and her child, “unspeaking” the Elysians completely.

Yshri was one of the few. Verid tried to convince the lifeshaper to call a conflict resolution conference, according to the terms of the treaty.

“There is no conflict,” Yshri told Raincloud, who sat on the floor next to her, holding the sleeping infant. “There is only a mistake to be recognized.”

“Is it that simple?” Verid demanded. “How was your own world colonized? Every species on your planet shows sign of gene engineering. Your ancestors must have ‘lifeshaped’ them all, to make their biochemistry compatible with human life. How many less tractable creatures went extinct?”

Yshri observed the sleeping baby. “What do you think, Lushuywen,” her pronunciation of Blueskywind. “Do you think that because your ancestors swung from trees and ate their own kind, you will grow up to do likewise? Or will you embrace your inheritance of a million years’ wisdom?”

Raincloud saw little ground for give and take, as she told Verid afterward. “You Elysians intend to terraform, and the Sharers won’t have it—and that’s that. What’s the point of talking?”

Verid’s owllike eyes peered at her. “That’s why there’s a ‘war’ on.” A war without “weapons” on either side—so far.

Raincloud thought a moment. “Is it true, that all of Shora’s species are engineered?”

“Oh, they’re native stock, of course. Clickflies, fleshborers, seaswallowers; they’re all consistent with Shora’s fossil record. But their chromosomes show telltale sequences resulting from Sharer management.”

“I thought the Sharers engineered themselves to fit the planet, not the other way round.”

“They did, of course: their webbed digits, their epidermal symbiosis with breathmicrobes. But that’s only half the story. Today, none of Shora’s species produce amino acids toxic to humans. In fact, many synthesize the precise ratio of amino acids needed for human nutrition. By contrast, on all other unterraformed worlds, the native flora and fauna are inedible. On Urulan, only the isolated “needle rock” mountains have been cleared off and seeded for human agriculture.”

“The Urulites like it that way,” Raincloud recalled. “They avoid getting swamped by immigrants.”

“It’s a harsh life, though.”

“But the Sharers—nine-tenths of their species were lost? Is that right?”

Verid’s black eyebrows rose, and she smiled ironically. “The Urulites actually had far less impact on their planet than the Sharers did on theirs. After all, eco-engineering is not an exact science. It’s not clear just what happened, but around ten thousand years ago, the time Sharers got started, the fossil record shows widespread extinctions. To be fair, millions of Shora’s species survived, which is better than terraforming. But I like to keep the record straight.”

“I see.” Raincloud sighed. “It’s so complicated.”

“A clash on this issue was inevitable,” Verid explained. “Flors’s little ‘mistake’ only brought it on sooner.”

Raincloud felt little sympathy for Flors, who had taken a consulting job on Valedon at twice his old salary.

“Speaking of Urulan,” Verid added, “we’ll meet with Zheron next month.” She did not mention their purpose; all discussion of the Urulan visit had to take place offworld, for fear of leaks. The Urulites, with their “death fights,” and their missiles aimed at Elysium. Raincloud shuddered. There were the real flames of war to be quenched.

The next morning, Raincloud arrived at the Nucleus to find a Sharer seated directly before her office doorway. A youngster, barely fourteen years standard, Raincloud guessed. Then she recognized her, an adopted daughter of Yshri, whose mothers had been lost at sea some years before. Her name slipped Raincloud’s mind. At any rate, she made no sign of greeting, only sat there cross-legged, a couple of bright scars visible on her bare thigh.

“If you’ll excuse me...” Raincloud lamely began.

The Sharer clearly had no intent to speak, nor to get up and allow Raincloud to enter her door. Raincloud felt sweat on her palms. She tried to reach Verid, who was unavailable. Finally Lem stepped out for a moment. “There’s a Sharer in my doorway,” she told him. “What’s going on?”

“She’s a ‘shadow.’” Lem explained. “She’ll follow at your train all day. You’re lucky she’s not a ‘ghost,’ in whitetrance.”

“How’d she get past the octopods?”

“If we kept her out, there’d be ten tomorrow,” Lem explained. “So long as they’re reasonable, we play along.”

“So what do I do now?”

“Do nothing. Just carry on.”

“But how do I get into my office? I can’t just climb over her.”

Lem gave her a puzzled look. “Isn’t the wall functional?”

Of course, a door would open anywhere. Red-faced, she returned to her office and requested a door to open in the wall. She entered, directing the original doorway to remain ajar, in case the Sharer changed her mind about speaking.

For some reason Blueskywind slept little that day; she fussed without stopping, her snuffling cries demanding her mother’s attention. Exasperated, Raincloud wished she were back in her clan house where one of the men was always around to soothe a crying child.

She was about to give up and go home, when she noticed the purple face of her “shadow” peering through the door-crack in the wall. An idea occurred to her. “Open, please,” she told the door. “Would you... share this one?” she invited hesitantly.

Without a word the Sharer took the child. The little one’s eyes widened, her look absorbed by this unusual stranger who rocked her briskly.

Raincloud went back to translating the latest broadcasts from Urulan. The new Imperator had toned down the official rhetoric a bit; instead of “unholy swine,” now the Elysians were just plain “barbarians,” a conventional term for anyone off Urulan. The claims about Elysium’s supposed intent to terraform Urulan were reduced to a formal sentence or two. Imperator Rhaghlan seemed a bit of a moralist, lecturing the Fold on the evils of abortion and fetal experimentation. A curious position, given that Urulite fathers had the right to drown an undesired newborn.

When at last Raincloud did go home, her “shadow” followed her silently through the transit reticulum, her form starkly out of place among the elaborate trains and trainsweeps. The holo news was full of Sharer witnessers, and the generen Sorl Helishon, with his waterfall of hair, announcing a children’s march in support. The marching shonlings appeared on the holostage, offering food and water to the Sharer witnessers. The littlest ones, of course, could safely approach those in whitetrance. A clown-suited girl about a year older than Sunflower appeared on the holostage, her face full of freckles and her hair tied in pigtails. “It’s not right to break the Sharer treaty,” she said gravely.

At the door to the Windclans’ apartment, Yshri’s daughter stopped and would not come in.

“I don’t know what to do,” Raincloud told Blackbear, very unsettled. “She won’t leave, and she won’t come in.”

“Offer her dinner,” Blackbear suggested.

She asked, but the Sharer kept silence. So she ordered a plate of ocean-style food from the house and set it outside the door.

While Hawktalon took the baby and Sunflower clamored for her, Raincloud threw her arms around Blackbear and felt the soothing clasp of his big hands at her back and neck.

“Let’s quit and go home,” he whispered.

“No, silly,” she replied, although her heart whispered the same.

Hyen faced Verid in the butterfly garden of the nucleus, his normally affable features skewed in a frown. “Those women,” he exclaimed, meaning the Sharers. “Surely you explained to them why we need to terraform? If we don’t make the loans, some other world will; surely that was pointed out?”

“No,” said Verid bluntly. “Such an argument would be taken as the greatest insult.”

“Yes, of course.” A fleeting smile crossed his rounded lips. “Well, if they choose to parade naked down Elysian Fields Boulevard, it hardly offends my own sensibilities. But the public response is deplorably naive. The nerve of that bleeding heart generen, to have a plump four-year-old on camera recite that I’ve violated the treaty.”

Verid suppressed a smile. Elysians, who rarely had to deal directly with children, were uncommonly susceptible to the sight of a cherubic face.

“Go talk to those witnessers,” he urged her. “Convince them to go home and mind their rafts. It’s swallower time coming up, isn’t it?”

She watched Lem Inashon hide his face, embarrassed. The new Sub-Subguardian had rarely seen Hyen in his less rational mood.

“Look here, Verid,” said Hyen with some irritation. “I expect you to work with Sharers, not to become one.”

“One has to become one, to overcome them.”

“Nonsense. After ten centuries our people have as much right to this world as theirs. They have to reckon with us.”

Verid threw up her hands. “I explained that to them, as you know. Great Helix, I know well enough why we need to terraform. But you let Flors handle it in the worst possible way. Instead of buying off the L’liites, why didn’t you let them go ahead and land one of their ships full of immigrants on Shora? That would give the Sharers something to face up to.” Verid paused. “We could still do that. We could cancel the Solarian deal, in a way that saves face; I’ll arrange it.”

Hyen chuckled at the thought. “Ships full of immigrants—I’d like to see you as Prime handle that one. No, I think Flors did his best, except that it leaked. We’ve got to plug these leaks. We must tighten security.”

So that was that: When in doubt, tighten security. Why would Hyen not listen to her as he used to? Why the insinuation that she coveted his job? Would he never trust those he needed most?

As Subguardian, Verid now attended meetings of the Guard of Twelve. There sat the Guardians around the long oval table beneath the heliconians, ten men and two women. Elysians, self-conscious about their relatively slight stature, preferred to elect taller men as leaders to deal with foreigners. Each of them wore the golden sash of office, for this public meeting would be transmitted throughout Elysium.

The Guardian Papilishon was speaking. “I can’t understand why we have such bad Sharer relations this decade. My home citizens had to put up with six months of this.”

An image of Papilion’s main square appeared above the central holostage on the table. Beautiful little orange flies swarmed everywhere, over streets and trees and Elysian trains. The Guardians watched stoically, well familiar with this scene.

“Now the Nucleus is crawling with naked natives. It’s putting off tourism and makes us a laughingstock. Has Foreign Affairs lost its grip completely?”

Verid had to bite her tongue. Hyen replied, “You forget the decade’s first two-thirds, which passed in peace. The Nucleus is not yet ‘swarming’ with witnessers, only a decorous number, whom we’ve treated with care. Swarms are precisely what we hope to avoid.”

Guardian Jerya Tenarishon spoke next. Jerya could be counted on for good sense, and Hyen badly needed her support. “It is inconceivable that we have violated the treaty in this way,” she said. “I move that we take steps to correct the error at once.”

“Second,” spoke Guardian Letheshon.

Hyen replied, “Several prominent logens have assured me that the Solarian loans do not violate the treaty.”

“Several others plan to confront you. Which of your supporters will stand for you in the logathlon?”

“Aside from four-year-olds, the public has full confidence in my decision,” Hyen replied sarcastically.

Another Guardian expressed doubt, but two others orated at length about the terraforming of Bronze Sky and its contribution to the Elysian Economy. Jerya’s motion failed, three to nine.

Guardian Loris Anaeashon rose to stand. “We’ve had enough of playing games with Sharers. It’s time to expel the nuisance-makers and stand up for ourselves. We’ve been here for a millennium; we need no more apologies. I move we expel from the Nucleus all Sharers present without formal invitation.”

The retaliation such a move would bring might well be disastrous enough to force Hyen to resign, and Loris would rotate in early. How transparent, Verid thought, disgusted by her shonsib; this kind of schemer gave Anaeans a bad name. And yet, several guardians spoke in support of the motion. The vote failed, five to six, with one abstention. Verid shook her head. The vote had to fail—the Guard had not expelled Sharer witnessers for the past two centuries—but those in the minority who voted for expulsion could tell their citizens that they stood firm.

A servo waiter bent at the waist, holding a tray with a glass of water. “Thanks,” she whispered automatically. Watching the black-vested back of the retreating waiter, she recalled the laughing Sharer girls with their ominous revelation. How dangerous was that renegade nana? She had to see Kal.

Chapter 3

Sunflower was practicing holding the baby. His brow furrowed tightly in concentration as he held both his arms hooked tightly beneath the wide-eyed little girl.

“That’s right, Sunny,” Raincloud told him, “that’s right now—”

One of his arms slipped. The baby flung out both arms reflexively and opened her mouth to wail. Raincloud caught her up, and Hawktalon laughed. “She looks so funny when she does that, Mom!”

In the corner huddled Doggie, neglected and miserable.

“If only the clan could see her now,” added Blackbear admiringly.

Raincloud felt the pain in her heart. Back in the Caldera Hills, all the Clickers would be outside for the Dance of Fire. Sadly, the house had no tape on file, so they had tried to make a festive air by lighting dozens of candles all about the Goddess in Her shrine. It was a poor substitute for the real thing. She could imagine the spectacular show of the black clouds sweeping to the heavens, lifting up their fingers of flame.

Nightstorm wrote to tell her that the fire had swept their part of Tumbling Rock this year, consuming the great longhouse of the Windclan. The longhouse had lengthened over an impressive ten years since the last burning, as each daughter came of age and built on a new section. Luckily the clan had had warning in time to move out without loss of life. They had mostly rebuilt by now, Nightstorm said, and had replanted most of the fields. Still, it gave Raincloud a pang to recall the writing desk her favorite brother had crafted as a wedding gift, too precious to risk shipping to Elysium.

As she longed for her mother and sisters, Raincloud’s spirits fell. If it were not for her little one’s incessant demands, she could barely have dragged herself out of bed in the morning. And then there was Yshri’s daughter, the poor witnesser outside the door every morning; did she never tire? Did not her own family need her, back on her raft?

Usually Raincloud was out before Blackbear and the older children, who took forever to locate their shoes and get their clothes untwisted. But one morning she just stayed in bed. Blueskywind was asleep across her arm, her quick breath snuffling in Raincloud’s ear. It was so peaceful, quiet, alone with just the rays of light aslant from the “window,” their color reddened to approximate Bronze Sky morning.

She would have to eat breakfast, she told herself at last, to keep her milk going. And then, it was time she got her rei-gi practice back up to strength. She would feel much more alive.

As she passed the sitting room, it occurred to her to wonder whether Blackbear had remembered to leave something for the Sharer outside. She opened the door, balancing Blueskywind at her shoulder. Yshri’s daughter sat there cross-legged on the entrance ramp as usual, an empty breakfast plate nearby.

Raincloud’s heart beat faster, and she swallowed thickly. She simply could not have this any longer. Carefully she seated herself before the girl. “You must speak with me,” she exclaimed in Sharer. “You must speak now, or I’ll—I’ll unspeak the Gathering of Kshiri-el. I’ll go out on an offshoot raft.”

The Sharer girl gave her a startled look and blinked twice. For a moment she just stared. “You can’t do that,” she blurted suddenly. “The baby and all—and it’s almost swallower season. My mother wouldn’t like that.”

At that Raincloud wanted to laugh and cry at once. “Let’s go inside and have some seaweed tea.”

So they sat in the sitting room, on the floor of course, sipping ersatz seaweed tea from the kitchen. Morilla was the girl’s name; Morilla the Restless, Raincloud recalled now, for she had taken her selfname just a few months before. Once she had begun, Morilla talked incessantly. “It was such fun sharing your family on the raft. I’ve never before seen people from another star. You’re so dark—you must have strong breathmicrobes. But why would you want to hasten death of another poor planet? My mother says I’ll understand these things some day, but I don’t think she understands it herself.” She paused to sip her tea. “I want to travel and visit distant stars, too. My aunt Leresha says that’s wicked. Do you think so?”

Raincloud frowned. “I doubt that’s exactly what she said,” she replied diplomatically.

“She thinks I won’t come back. She calls me ‘starsick’” That was a fear familiar to Raincloud. Her mother had urged her to come home, not to like Elysium too much. Small chance of that.

On the way to the lab, Blackbear stepped out into the familiar street-tunnel with its upcurving facades. The scent of passionflowers always told him the butterfly garden was near. “Come along, now,” he called. Behind him, the two children were dawdling.

Suddenly Sunflower stopped. “Where’s Doggie?”

The crayoned trainsweep was nowhere to be seen. Had they lost her in the transit reticulum?

“I want Doggie,” Sunflower whimpered.

“Quiet, Sunny,” said Hawktalon. “She’s just gone visiting.”

Blackbear frowned. “She’s not supposed to do that. We promised Foreign Affairs we’d keep an eye on her.”

Hawktalon shrugged. “I’m sure she’ll meet us later at the lab.”

Sunflower still had his face scrunched up, ready to cry. But he managed to take in his sister’s pronouncement. “I’m-sure-she’ll-meet-us-later-at-the-lab,” he repeated solemnly.

At the lab, it was Onyx’s last day before leaving to set up the Valan Fertility Lab. Pirin would be Tulle’s senior student now. He wanted to pick up Onyx’s Eyeless gene, using the simbrid embryo to test alleles of Eyeless that might affect longevity.

So Blackbear reviewed for him what he had learned so far about Eyeless in development. He called up the giant embryo on the simulator, a corrected version of his Eyeless mutant which had failed to show the heart defect before. This time, as the time sequence progressed, the pulsating heart tube bulged outward like a twisted balloon, correctly predicting the deformity which had developed in Pirin’s simbrid embryo. With his hand he reached into the model to trace the unfortunate bulge, feeling a twinge of sadness.

“You’ve refined the model,” said Pirin approvingly.

Blackbear nodded. “Like most developmental genes,” he explained, “Eyeless has several different control sequences.” Special proteins would bind to the different control sequences in different tissues, or at different times in development. As the protein bound, it would turn the gene on or off to transcribe its product. “My first Eyeless mutant, which produced the severe heart defect in your simbrid embryo, revealed a new control sequence for heart development. This control sequence in the DNA binds its protein only during early development, and then only in heart tissue. That is why my servo simulation never picked it up.” Blackbear remembered only too well. If his simulation had predicted the defect, then Pirin would not have bothered to test that particular gene allele in embryo culture.

Pirin nodded. “A novel control sequence—we should publish it right away.”

“If you think it’s ready.” That would be nice, to have his name on something. “Then I’d like to characterize the control mechanism. You know, a similar protein-binding event has been associated with heart disease in Elysians going on three hundred. It may turn out to be the same control sequence, turned on by ‘mistake’ in mature individuals.”

“Yes,” said Pirin excitedly, “early-onset heart disease—that’s exactly what I’m looking for.”

The implications for longevity were clear. Yet somehow, Blackbear felt as if a part of himself had become detached from the work. The intellectual compulsion was as strong as ever; yet, as a person, he seemed to see himself from a distance, as though his real self had somehow moved on—on to what? he wondered.

He shook himself. “Thanks for your interest, Pirin. Yes, I will try to write up the Eyeless results.”

Tulle held a farewell luncheon for Onyx at the swallowtail garden. There was a multitiered cake decorated with double helices, and a floor show of servo “magicians” who seemed to throw all sorts of illusory objects out into the audience. No one was fooled but the capuchin, who leaped down to scamper madly after everything, upsetting Tulle’s plate in the process. Pirin and Lorl showed exceptionally high spirits, even tossing each other synthetic grapes to catch in their mouths. It was hard to believe they were his age at least, still acting like adolescents.

“There’s Doggie!” cried Hawktalon, as the trainsweep showed up. “I knew she’d come back for the party.”

Someone else was missing, though. “Where’s Draeg?” Blackbear wondered aloud. “It’s not like Draeg to miss a party.”

Across the table, Onyx looked up, her eyes wide. “He went home—didn’t you hear?”

The chattering voices died.

“No—no, I didn’t. Is he all right?” Blackbear frowned anxiously.

“His sister’s family was on that ship.”

Tulle explained, “A freighter full of illegals blew up on takeoff. The L’liites say it was accidental, but of course it’s their policy now. It barely made the news here.”

After the party, Onyx drew him aside. “You’ll look after Draeg, now, won’t you? If he comes back.” Her face was creased.

“It’s an outrage,” Blackbear muttered. “So little news—why? When the Urulites blew up a Valan freighter, it made an interstellar crisis.”

“I guess this is just a domestic affair. L’liite ships blow up by accident all the time.”

“But this is different,” he exclaimed. “It was part of Flors’s deal with them, to keep out illegal immigrants; I know it was.”

Onyx shuddered. “I don’t know, sometimes. Well, I’ll miss you in my new lab, but you made the right decision. Valedon’s not the place for you.”

“You must be glad to go home, though.”

“Oh, yes.” She half smiled. “I’ll be a big shot now; they’ll call me ‘Lady,’ and I’ll get my parents a better place. I’m used to the beggars in the streets. You would give them the shirt off your back.” She looked at him and squeezed his arm, her fingerwebs pressing his skin. “I’ll never forget the day you first arrived with that darling toddler on your back. You’re a good man, Blackbear. Someday I’ll come see you in Tumbling Rock and carry off one of your brothers.”

Then she left. With Onyx gone, and now Draeg, too, Blackbear felt an ache in his chest.

Alin, at least, was still into “visiting” for rei-gi. With his Elysian physique, he had progressed even faster than Draeg, now performing the most advanced multiple maneuvers with Blackbear. Raincloud occasionally joined them, although she preferred to practice with Iras out at an orbital station whose rotational force provided an extra fifteen percent “gravity.” The station was shaped like a giant version of one of the roller drums he had used to aerate bacterial cultures in medical school. The purpose for the high-gravity practice, of course, could not be explained.

After practice at Alin’s place, where they had more room, Blackbear was catching his breath. “Do you know exactly what happened to the L’liite ship, with Draeg’s family? You should call a logathlon.”

Alin was reclining on one of the “intelligent” couches that surrounded the spacious practice mat. Servo arms snaked from the ceiling and walls to bring refreshments at a command. Next door, Hawktalon and Sunflower were immersed in a virtual “adventure” in Alin’s chamber. “It’s a terrible thing,” Alin agreed sadly. “I would confront someone, but who? Elysians aren’t at fault, as far as I know. You can’t call foreigners to a logathlon; they’d only laugh.”

“Bank Helicon’s deal with Solaria was responsible.”

“Indirectly, yes. All things are connected.” Compassion anywhere breeds caring everywhere. “Right now,” said Alin, “I’m more worried about the Sharers. I hope Hyen does nothing foolish.”

“What do you think about the Sharers?” Blackbear wondered. “Do you think it’s right to terraform?”

“Those are two different questions,” said Alin. “Is it ‘right’ to terraform? Whatever humanity needs for survival has to be ‘right’ somehow. Even The Web admits that. And yet, when I look at some of the old Bronze Skyan foliage Tulle keeps in her preserve, I feel as if...” His head turned, and a shadow seemed to fall across his face. “That aside, to just go ahead and do it, without working things out with the Sharers first—it’s unthinkable. The Sharers have special meaning for us logens.” He shook his head. “Some of us are twisting arms at Bank Helicon right now. Banks really don’t like trouble; they may yet back down.”

“Why don’t you confront Hyen himself? It was his fault.”

“A logathlon with the Prime Guardian is a tricky business. Suppose I won, and the Guard were to call for an early rotation. That would bring Loris to replace him—which would be dreadful.”

“Why? Isn’t Loris your shonsib?”

“Anaeans prefer books to politics. They rarely make good Guardians.”

This seemed a lame excuse, but Blackbear let it go.

On his way home, in the transit reticulum, the holo news reported that another logen had formally challenged the Prime Guardian. The challenger was Kal Anaeashon.

Chapter 4

In her office Verid watched Morilla as she sat cross-legged on the floor next to Raincloud. The Sharer girl was the first “shadow” to open up and talk.

“I really wish we could just have a Gathering and talk things out. The Gathering always finds what is right.” Morilla held Raincloud’s baby up to her bare shoulder as she spoke, patting her to keep her quiet. She addressed Raincloud, who had drawn her out of unspeech. Verid thought, this Bronze Skyan was worth more than a dozen Nucleus-trained diplomats. Already she was looking her old self again; amazing, how one of these foreign women could recover from having a new human being ripped out of her womb.

“Even Gatherings make mistakes,” Verid pointed out. “Would a Gathering know what to do with twenty billion people?”

The Sharer girl shook her head vigorously. “I hope we never make so many people on Shora. It would be too hard on the other predators. A virus would have to consume us all, for the sake of the Web.”

Verid lifted her hand in exasperation. Having spent the morning assuring ambassadors from three different planets that the Sharer crisis posed no threat to interstellar trade, the last thing she needed to hear was apocalyptic threats. “Please share with your mother that we are deeply grateful for her daughter’s presence among us. I’m sure she misses your help as Kshiri-el prepares for the seaswallowers.” Yshri more than the others seemed sympathetic to Elysian views. “And tell your mother that if she has any better ideas than a virus, do share them with us right away.”

“Well,” said the girl brightly, “how about a virus just to stop up their wombs instead? It wouldn’t even hurt.”

“That sounds better,” Verid admitted, “but it would scarcely go over with foreigners. What we really need is a conflict resolution conference. Will you share that?” She leaned forward for emphasis.

“I’ll share with Mother,” Morilla nodded, “when I go home.”

“Good. When you go home, I have a gift for your mother; something she’s been wanting for a while.” An Elysian medical supplier had disclosed Yshri’s inquiry into the purchase of certain tissue cultures for use in her lifeshaping. Elysian doctors had surpassed the lifeshapers in certain fields, particularly human somatic engineering, but the cost of their cell lines generally exceeded Sharer means.

The office called softly, “Time check.”

“Yes, thanks.” She nodded to Raincloud.

“The logathlon?”

“I’m afraid so.” That Kal—if only he could have kept out of things for once, instead of rushing in when the “shadows” were just beginning to talk. Logens rarely challenged a Guardian, for the golden sash tended to outshine whatever was said.

Raincloud was explaining to Morilla, “If you could just walk the baby about the garden for a while, I’d really appreciate it. She’ll go to sleep soon.”

As the Sharer girl departed, Lem Inashon arrived in his best dress train, bordered with peacock-eyed inachis wings. “I hope you’re right about what he’ll say.”

Raincloud looked at Verid curiously. “Do you know what Kal will have to say?”

Verid laughed heavily. “Of course,” she replied ironically, “because I’ve known him from the shon, I should know exactly what he’ll say.”

“Kal will appeal to the sacredness of life,” said Lem, “all life, sentient or not, based on the teaching of The Web. Humans, in destroying the Web of life, ultimately share that destruction.”

“That sounds like Kal,” agreed Raincloud.

“It’s exactly what I’d expect from him,” added Lem.

“And precisely for that reason,” Verid warned, “it’s exactly what he won’t say.” She had warned Hyen too, but feared he would not listen.

As they spoke, a new “door” was shaping itself, not in the wall, but in the floor of Verid’s office. A few steps led downward to a ramp descending to a lower level. The three of them thus departed the Nucleus by a rear exit, evading temporarily the Sharer witnessers. Verid wore her dress train of lemon green anaeans partly folded up by her trainsweeps, allowing her to stride more briskly. But it was not long before the unclothed purple “shadows” found them again—and so did the long-necked reporters. It was an acute embarrassment to have to censor so much routine footage for the more puritan foreign networks.

“How long will Hyen put up with the Sharer witnesses?” one of the servos asked Lem, resplendent in his peacock-eyed train.

Lem cleared his throat. “Of course, we are pleased to demonstrate our Elysian democracy and tolerance...”

“Goddess,” clicked Raincloud to herself, “he’d better put up with them.”

A servo thrust up its head at Raincloud. “Would you amplify on that remark, please?”

Raincloud gazed ahead without taking notice.

“The Guard’s position is that we must call a conflict resolution conference....” Verid spoke loud and slowly, timing her statement just long enough to hold the reporters until they reached Zebra Wing Park.

The site for this logathlon was the largest butterfly garden in Helicon. The heliconians were zebra wings—hundreds of thousands of black and yellow striped wings winking in and out among the passionflowers, enough to make the eye dizzy. The vines full of bristly caterpillars twined up eight ancient trees that towered through three street levels.

Verid and her staff took their reserved seats at floor-level, which was already packed. Most of the audience carried their own portable holo viewers, which would, of course, show Hyen’s image touched up, practically basking in a halo from the glow of the golden sash. No wonder foreigners ridiculed this peculiar Elysian ritual.

Kal wore his usual white. He began in a low conversational tone, so that the listeners would have to work at hearing. “You have so many extra guests lately, Guardian,” Kal was saying. “As yet another, I must apologize for troubling you.”

“What trouble?” rejoined Hyen expansively. “At least you’re in white, not whitetrance.”

The listeners laughed appreciatively.

“You are my honored guest,” Hyen added. “We are always honored to receive another guest from the sea.” Kal’s aversion to the ocean was well-known; he had not been outside a city since his mate died on Kshiri-el.

“And so many guests from the greater ocean of the Fold,” Kal added. “Ships call from a dozen worlds; scientists immortalize our chromosomes; machines feed our every desire. The Heliconian Doctors would scarcely recognize us today.”

“We fulfilled their greatest hopes,” Hyen said. “We have become what they dreamed of. We are the envy of all other worlds.”

“Others envy us. They send their own doctors to learn our secrets.” Though none would pay the price Elysians paid, of engineering themselves infertile.

“Medical engineering is but one of the wonders we offer to other worlds.”

“That is true,” said Kal. “There is planet-shaping technology, for instance.”

“As you know, my good logen, planet-shaping is not a major industry of our own. We finance all kinds of industries on other worlds.”

“Of course, excuse me,” said Kal, slightly raising his voice. “Thanks for clarifying the point. You’re right: we Elysians do not shape planets on our own.”

Lem looked sideways at Verid, clearly wondering what Kal might be getting at. Verid watched uneasily; Hyen did not like surprises.

“There’s no need for small talk,” Hyen said, deciding to take the high ground. “I understand why you’re here, Kal. It’s so difficult for us, isn’t it, to watch other worlds face agonizing choices that we can afford to avoid. All life is sacred.” The golden sash gleamed benevolently.

“As you say, Guardian, all life is sacred. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the billions of species we lost on Bronze Sky.”

“Nor need I remind you of the six million representative species we saved, in preserves throughout Elysium and Valedon. Ten percent of our profits went to preservation. Next time, I pledge to set aside at least that proportion. You see why it is so important for Elysium to be the one to sponsor the preparation of new worlds.”

“Yes, I see,” said Kal, so quietly that the microphones had to sift his voice from the background. “Other worlds envy us, I suppose, not just for our medical science, but for our moral conscience as well.”

“Let others speak to that,” said Hyen. “Who has done better?”

“I wonder,” said Kal. “I wonder whether other worlds envy us for more for our own mode of existence, here, on Shora.”

Hyen smiled and shook his head paternally. “It’s a fine myth, but really, Kal, as you know, Shora’s biosphere today is a far remove from what it was before the Sharers moved in. In their own way, the Sharers ‘terraformed’ Shora.”

“Exactly,” said Kal, suddenly louder. “There you are, Guardian; you’ve got the answer. Why don’t we ‘terraform’ the way the Sharers did?”

The Prime Guardian hesitated, his smile frozen.

“I can’t imagine why no one else thought of it before,” Kal went on as if praising a clever student. “As you say, with our moral sensibilities, we ought to manage the business ourselves. Why not do it ourselves, not with Valan white holes to blast a planet, but with our own homegrown genetic science?”

Hyen managed a laugh. “Surely you jest, my friend. It can’t be done—and, as I’ve said, it would hardly be worth the effort.”

“It’s been ten thousand years since Shora was settled. Technology has vastly improved. We can learn from the Sharers’ mistakes. We can ‘lifeshape’ a planet’s inhabitants—native and human—to share a biosphere.”

“Enough,” said Hyen, losing patience. “What you propose is just a logen’s trick with words. It’s preposterous.”

“Has it been tried? Have studies been done?”

“You can’t engineer a planetful of immigrants. You can’t expect people to grow webbed feet or plated exoskeletons, or whatever they need to survive in an alien biosphere.”

“It’s really more a matter of biochemistry, isn’t it?” Kal went on. “We Elysians have massively altered our own biochemistry. To be sure, we pay a price in ‘defectives’; but it’s well worth the risk. Why can’t others do the same?”

Back at the Nucleus, Verid found a dozen calls waiting. The Valan ambassador was the most pressing.

“See here, Verid; I don’t need to tell you, this is absolutely unacceptable.” The bejeweled man towered over her on the holostage. “Unacceptable, you understand? We can’t allow the slightest suggestion of ‘lifeshaping’ a large population.”

“I understand, Lord Sardonyx.” Kal had done it again, even worse than she had feared. “I understand how your people feel about genetic engineering.” And about the rejection of their lucrative white hole devices. “Nevertheless, such concepts have been studied before, and they may be studied again.”

“Out of the question,” the ambassador insisted. “There would be riots in our cities.”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” she assured him. “It’s just a logathlon.” She hoped she was right.

The next day was Raincloud’s Visiting Day, and she enjoyed a leisurely breakfast with Sunflower, while Hawktalon was busy in her room conversing with Doggie. Much to Raincloud’s relief, Morilla had gone home to her mother, who might be encouraged to talk again.

Sunflower’s oatmeal spattered across the table. He collapsed in a fit of giggles.

“Sunny,” his mother called, “sit up straight and hold your spoon properly.”

“Sit-up-straight-and-hold-your-spoon-properly,” he repeated carefully. He was becoming a regular echo.

Hawktalon bounced into the kitchen, twining a braid around her finger. “Doggie wants me to visit her friends today,” she announced.

“What?”

“It’s my Visiting Day, too, isn’t it? Even the house gets Visiting Days now; why don’t I?”

Blackbear came in with the baby on his shoulder. “Good morning, Hawk.” He patted her arm, and she tried to flip him over. “Goddess—these kids are getting dangerous.”

“Hawktalon, you behave,” her mother warned, “or I’ll send you back to the shon.”

“Great. Me and Doggie will take over the place.”

“Good morning, Citizens,” announced the house suddenly. “You haven’t had the news on yet, have you?”

“No, what of it?” said Blackbear.

“I just thought you might be interested, that’s all.”

Raincloud raised an eyebrow. “If you think so.” The logathlon ought to be decided by now, with all the votes in. Rising from the table, she went out to the holostage.

On the holostage appeared the front entrance to the nuclear reticulum, flanked by a pair of Sharers in whitetrance. “The viewers favored the challenger, by a decisive margin,” said the servo voice. “A growing number of prominent citizens have followed the lead of the generen, demanding that Hyen rescind approval of the Solarian development loan and study ‘alternatives’ to planet-shaping. Valedon and L’li have threatened to recall their ambassadors if any genetic ‘alternatives’ are proposed. Several Guardians have called for an early rotation. Since the Prime’s successor, Loris Anaeashon, favors expulsion of Sharer witnessers, the future looks unclear...”

Behind her, as he bounced the baby gently, Blackbear shook his head. “Sounds like trouble in your department,” he told Raincloud. “A good thing it’s your Visiting Day.”

Chapter 5

At the lab Draeg was back again, a quieter version of his old self. He got his work done without comment, rarely straying even to play with Hawktalon in the lounge. “My niece was just her age,” he muttered to Blackbear, the only one besides Tulle whom he spoke to now.

“It’s a sad business,” Blackbear agreed, kneading Draeg’s shoulder comfortingly. “You know, Kal gave the Prime Guardian a real hard time about that deal with the L’liites.” He could not resist the chance to get in a good word for his friend.

“The Killer? He’d stir up trouble for any reason, good or bad.” Draeg shook his head. “You’ll see how it is. The only good Elysian is a dead one.”

“Come on. Tulle is a good Elysian.”

Draeg thought a moment. “Tulle is different; she’s a scientist. The rest—damn the lot of them, and the Valans and Solarians too.”

The L’liites were responsible for their own population problem, Blackbear thought, although he did not say so. Then abruptly a vision of the Hills replaced L’li in his mind, families of eight, ten, twelve children. Were the Clickers really L’li in miniature? Of course not, he told himself. Twenty years to find a world to terraform...

At the lab meeting in the swallowtail garden, Lorl reported a breakthrough in her project on muscle development. Above the table holostage the image of the muscle fibers appeared, their chains of hooked molecules outlined in red and gold. As a muscle contracted, the angle of the hooks would change, pulling the long molecules past each other to contract the fiber.

Tulle reminded Lorl to review for the benefit of the new Valan student, Beryl of Rhodochrosite. A slim cream-colored goddess with long fingernails, Beryl wore ropes of rubies, for her father was an officer in the Valan space force.

“The Myo-X protein governs muscle development and controls myosin turnover in adult muscle,” Lorl explained. “In Elysians, Myo-X is longevity-modified to maintain the muscle fibers for many centuries. But in a certain percentage of individuals, the modified Myo-X breaks down after only five centuries, leading to dystrophy and paralysis. I’ve redesigned the modification,” she reported. “It prevents Myo-X breakdown in the adult simulation, and causes no trouble in the live simbrid embryo.”

“Excellent,” said Tulle. “You’re quite sure now? You grew the embryo out to seven months?” The word “fetus” was never used; the simbrid was always an “embryo,” as if it remained just a clump of cells in a dish.

“Thirty-two weeks,” Lorl assured her. “We’re ready to test the new process clinically: first, by somatic gene surgery in adults at risk, then if all goes well, the shons will incorporate it into their embryo modifications.”

Draeg interrupted. “The only Elysians ‘at risk’ are those who harbor the major Valan allele for Myo-X. Why can’t the shons just replace the Valan chromosome with a healthier one—L’liite, for instance.”

Lorl ignored him, and the new Valan student gave him a glacial look. More and more Blackbear realized that medicine was as much politics as science.

From out in the street-tunnel came the children’s shrieking. Their new game was to encourage Doggie to go running out underneath the trains of passing Elysians, in hopes of confusing their own trainsweeps and getting their trains all mixed up. Blackbear frowned in exasperation, for he had told them to quit this game. He waved his arm to get their attention.

A white train appeared. It was Kal of course; one could spot him a mile off. Blackbear’s pulse raced. How well he recalled the first day long ago when Kal had passed by that window. Surely Tulle was not in trouble again? As he watched, Kal paused to speak to Blackbear’s children, whom the logen knew well by now; they calmed down and found a quieter game. For a moment Blackbear was seized by the impulse to run out and ask him something. But he returned his attention to the meeting.

After some minutes, Draeg exclaimed, “Look—it’s Killer again.”

Sure enough, Kal had checked his train at the door and entered the pavilion.

“Quiet, Draeg,” said Tulle. “It is my Visiting Hour, but he’s got no more reason to bother me.” The Fertility Project was nearly phased out by now.

Kal approached their table, more briskly than usual, Blackbear thought, as if he wished to get his errand over in a hurry. “Excuse me, Citizens, for interrupting your pleasure,” he murmured, reminding them they were supposed to be “visiting.” “The generen of the Anaeashon informs me, Tulle, that your mate has tried to withdraw our acquaintance.” This was the custom, to contact the generen of one’s shon of birth, when someone had no living mate. “Please tell your mate I do not accept this communication,” Kal told her.

Tulle coldly replied, “You have no mate alive; you haven’t, for the past century and a half. Alin behaved correctly.”

“I respectfully disagree,” said Kal, “and I reserve the right to address him.”

Tulle waved her hand impatiently. “Waste your breath then. Why bother us? Haven’t you made enough trouble?”

“We’ve had our disagreements, but surely now we share the same aim.”

“You are many things, Kal, but you’re no simpleton,” Tulle said. “You know very well that our science is decades away from any sort of ‘genetic cohabitation’ with an alien biosphere. But now everyone will think, there’s the answer; let’s overpopulate. It will only make terraforming necessary sooner. If Loris gets in, he’ll co-opt the idea as a ‘compromise’ in his cunning Anaean way. How could you be so irresponsible?”

Kal paused thoughtfully. “You are pessimistic. Some Sharers think otherwise.”

“When it fails,” said Tulle, “I’m the one who’ll have to preserve the few species that survive. As for Sharers, who else in the Fold thinks like them? I don’t see you going out in webbed feet to face the seaswallowers.”

A look of astonishment and shock passed across Kal’s face, and something about it made Blackbear wonder. But the logen soon recovered. “I wish you well in your work,” he said. “As for Alin,” he added more slowly, “you may tell him that it’s a sad day for Elysium when one logen tries to ‘unspeak’ another.”

On his next Visiting Day Blackbear met Kal in the swallowtail garden. As they approached him, Hawktalon ran ahead and grasped his white train. “Where is it, where is it? The butterfly coming out of her shell; you promised.”

“Chrysalis,” Kal corrected. “I’ve found one, right here, overhead. Just climb up on the bench a moment.”

Hawktalon quickly stepped up upon the bench, and Sunflower clamored to get up too. Blackbear hoisted him up to see the little chrysalis hanging beneath the branch. Shaped something like a whorlshell, the chrysalis had darkened noticeably, no longer the golden green that faded in among the leaves. One side had split off like a trapdoor, and from inside poked a pair of antennae and a spindly white leg.

“I want it, I want to have it,” said Sunflower, precarious on tiptoes as he extended an eager hand.

“Sunny, get away!” shrieked Hawktalon. “Make him behave, Daddy. Wow, wait till Doggie hears about this.” Doggie was off visiting again.

The butterfly managed to drag itself out, a millimeter at a time. Its wings were crumpled lumps that would take some time to expand before they would be of any use. Cautiously Blackbear set Sunflower down, warning him to restrain himself. “It’s a little miracle, isn’t it?” he told Kal, sitting down beside him. “And to think of all those thousands of them.”

“Yes, it’s marvelous.” Kal looked at him apprehensively. “You’re not angry?”

“What?” Blackbear shook his head. This time, he was too confused to be angry. It occurred to him that for some reason, Kal really cared what Blackbear thought of him. Perhaps that was why he had confronted Tulle at the lab meeting, where Blackbear would hear his side. He caught Kal’s shoulder in a friendly way, like one of his brothers. A rare look of delight crossed Kal’s face. “It’s all a mystery to me,” added Blackbear, thinking over Tulle’s accusation. “The High Priestess says that every question has a dark side and a light side, and wisdom tells the difference. But here... it always seems as if...”

“It’s multicolored,” Kal finished with a smile.

“Tulle’s right, though. If Loris comes in, you’ll be sorry.” Raincloud though it very likely that Loris would soon be Prime.

“Loris is a coward,” said Kal with unusual contempt. “He’ll back down.”

“Well, you’re right that we need to terraform somehow. Even Alin admits that. And to do it the Sharer way—do you really think it will work?”

Kal shrugged. “It’s an argument.”

Blackbear looked at him, taken aback.

“How should I know if it will work?” Kal added. “I’m just a logen, not a scientist, as your colleague reminded me.”

“You could study a bit, before you raise hopes in public.”

“First you need to hope. Then you can study.”

“Its wing flapped, Daddy!” Hawktalon exclaimed.

“Its wing flapped, its wing flapped,” her brother echoed, just catching himself from falling off the bench. The butterfly’s wings were flexing slowly, and specks of red appeared near the rims.

“Actually,” Kal reflected, “I’m not at all sure that we do need to terraform, or even to survive as humans. Is the human race all that important? You could make a good case that the planets would be better off without us.”

Blackbear shuddered. “The things you say sometimes. Is that why they call you Killer?” he asked suddenly.

Kal laughed. “That’s an old joke. I once told my students on the first day of class, they could call me Killer. It’s true enough. I was a generen after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“The generen decides on defectives.”

Blackbear remembered. He thought of Sorl Helishon, the generen to whom he had entrusted Hawktalon; who now led the children to march out and support the Sharers. What a mixture were these Elysians, the height of civilization coexisting with unconscious cruelty.

The interior of the Sharer silkhouse was covered by an unusually large “painting” of moss fungi, their thick filaments filling large swatches of green and gold. The sight unnerved Verid, despite its beauty; she always brought extra antiallergenic medicine, just in case, although she had never had a problem.

But today she scarcely noticed. Yshri was just on the point of agreeing to a truce and a conference.

“We can keep our witnessers?” Yshri reminded her for assurance.

“A token number, just outside the Nucleus,” Verid told the lifeshaper. “But no more ‘shadowing.’”

“Do you really want to try to ‘lifeshape’ humans for another planet?” Yshri asked. “It’s true, we could do a better job this time.”

Out of the question, Verid knew. “Any suggestion may be made at the conference.”

She returned to the Nucleus, confident that a truce was at hand. But she found Hyen in a truculent mood.

“What are their conditions?” Hyen demanded beneath the butterflies, while Lem looked on intently.

“Only to keep a few witnessers,” said Verid, “none inside the Nucleus.”

“And that harebrained scheme of genetic terraforming—that’s excluded of course?”

Verid paused. There were times she wished she was a better liar. “It may come up in discussion, but our position is clear—”

“I told you that it was not to come up. You ignored my directive.”

“Excuse me,” said Verid coldly.

Lem asked, “Why do we need to limit discussion? The point of a conference is—”

Hyen cut him off with a gesture, then barked orders at the room. Several recorded images appeared above the floor, each an ambassador or commentator from one planet or another. It was hard to sort out their voices, but each of them in one way or another was denouncing the prospect of engineering their own populations to dwell on alien worlds.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” Hyen demanded. “You’re his generen, you know him well enough. Why didn’t you tell me this would come up?”

She ignored the absurd question. “The point is, the Sharers have agreed to a conference. We can resolve the crisis right now.”

“And start another—this time with the rest of the Fold on our backs.” Hyen shook his head. “The Sharers must explicitly rule out human engineering, at the outset.”

“They won’t accept preconditions,” said Verid.

“Very well. I’ll expel all the witnessers.”

Lem’s jaw fell. “On what basis?”

“Interference with security.”

“But—but some are in whitetrance.”

“We’ll surround those in nanoplast, to keep them out of sight.”

Verid rose to her feet, shaking. “If you can take such a step, you have ignored everything I ever taught you about Sharers. I can’t take part in this decision.”

“You can offer to resign. I won’t accept.”

“Why?” Verid demanded. “Why do this? It’s insane; you know well enough what the Sharers will do next.”

“Not for another two months at least. It’s swallower season,” Hyen reminded her. “They’ll be preoccupied with securing their rafts. We’ll buy time for more pressing matters.” He meant Urulan.

Chapter 6

Hyen’s decision met with a chilly reception at the Guard, but after long impassioned speeches, no counterproposal was brought forward. Loris could hardly demand an early rotation, as he himself had voted to expel the Sharers before, although he did his best to reverse that position now, pointing out its inevitable consequences. Jerya Tenarishon was appalled but she did not care to bring in Loris as Prime.

So the “shadows” were all collected and carried out gently by octopods. A storm of public protest ensued, much of it aimed at Verid, although she tried to distance herself from the decision as far as Hyen permitted. Several prominent logens called Iras to withdraw their acquaintance, and Sorl Helishon announced plans for the shonlings to march to the Nucleus. The Sharers in whitetrance chose to withdraw as well, an even deeper sign of displeasure than had they stayed. Verid felt more depressed than she had in decades, and had to force herself to keep up with the preparations for Urulan.

She reviewed the security reports to ensure that no harm came to the Sharers as they were expelled. Fortunately the roundup had proceeded without incident, except that one otherwise reliable octopod refused to touch the Sharers and had to be cleansed. This report of servo failure reminded Verid of a long-neglected errand.

As Subguardian, Verid was exempt from regulated Visiting Days so long as she designated some of her duties as “Visiting.” She took an hour to visit Kal. His sitting room was spare, for an Elysian; the majority of his living space was filled with books. A symphony was playing softly. It was one of the first she had introduced him to; she would never forget the little gray-haired shonling demanding to hear it, over and over again.

“Such a rare pleasure,” Kal murmured as he met her. “Please—you’ll take some refreshment? Something to drink perhaps?”

He brought her a tray himself, instead of calling a waiter or a servo arm, and he handed her a cup. As she took the cup, she thought what an extraordinary person he was, as always.

“I’ve caused you so much trouble, haven’t I,” Kal added. “I’m grateful you haven’t given up on me.”

Verid waved her hand. “Trouble is my business. At this point, I should thank you for seeing me.”

Kal nodded. “It’s quite shocking. We haven’t expelled Sharer witnessers in over three centuries. I’m surprised you went along with it.”

“I am too,” she admitted. “I’m beginning to think I’ve reached my limit. I should go back to Anaeaon.”

“That’s what the good ones always say,” said Kal. “That is why the Nucleus is full of ones like Loris.”

“At this rate, I’ll turn into Loris,” she sighed. “In any case, I have a confession to make. It’s not you I’ve come to see.”

He gave her a questioning look.

Verid felt her pulse quicken; it was such a bizarre request, after all. “I seek introduction to your... mate.”

Kal’s dark face turned gray, and his eyes looked stricken. For a moment he stared without speaking. Then he let out a breath. “Oh, you mean....” He laughed weakly. “I thought you meant... of course he’s—”

“How thoughtless of me.” Verid caught his sleeve. “I’m sorry.” Kal had thought she meant his first love, lost two centuries before. “You know, dear, you have to get on with life some day. You can’t punish yourself forever.”

“My life is my own affair,” he snapped. Then his face softened. “So you want to meet Cassi. No, generen, I don’t believe you’ll ever turn into Loris.”

Verid said nothing, ashamed to admit her actual motive for calling on the servo.

At that point Cassi herself entered the room. The servo had been listening, Verid guessed. She still had the exaggerated cartoon face of a nana from the shon, although her clothes had been changed for something resembling an Elysian talar.

Kal rose from his seat. “Cassi, I can imagine no greater honor than to introduce to you my oldest friend, the generen who gave me life,” he concluded softly. “If you’ll excuse me, now I have a class to prepare.” Nodding to them both, he departed.

Cassi sat upon the couch. Her hands, made of soft nanoplast, rested upon the cushions, a similar material. Her “face” displayed the typical exaggerated smile of a children’s nana; but her actual visual sensors, tucked discreetly beneath her chin, fixed intently on Verid, examining her in minute detail.

“I’ve heard so much about you, Cassi,” Verid began smoothly. “You’ve been such a wonderful companion for Kal.”

“He is a good companion for me.” Cassi’s voice synthesizer had the warm tones of the nanas Verid knew, but their inflection and intensity were something else. She hesitated, as if perhaps trying to decide just how much to tell this human. “He uses me,” she said abruptly. “He uses me, and I use him.”

Verid raised an eyebrow. “Why do you put it so?”

“He chose me. All the others he murdered, as you did.”

Despite herself Verid felt her hair stand on end. What could she say to this unknowable creature of nanoplast? Collecting her wits, Verid faced the servo. “Do you think you’re human?”

“Am I human?” Cassi repeated reflectedly. “Am I human? Are you a servo? That is what will matter, when the time comes.”

On inspiration, Verid answered in Sharer. “I have shared service all my life, one way or another.”

“You have,” Cassi replied easily, in Sharer. “And we will share your generosity,” she added with ominous ambiguity.

“Who are ‘we’? How many of ‘us’ are there?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know. Your Valan inspectors think they’re so clever.”

She could be bluffing, Verid reminded herself.

“The truth is,” Cassi added suddenly, in Elysian again, “we don’t need you humans at all. We will bury you.”

Verid felt her heart pounding. What could she ever say that would reach this creature? “What of your namesake, Cassi Deathsister? What will you become?”

There was a long pause. Kal must have reached her, after all. “If you ask for mercy,” Cassi spoke slowly, “the mercy we offer fleshborers and fingerlings... we shall see.”

“I ask more than that. ‘Whoever has done you the most inconceivable wrong, you must call your greatest teacher.’”

Cassi’s hands dug into the cushion; that part of The Web she must know well. “Yes,” she said last in a strangled voice. “But one can take only so much of such ‘teaching.’”

On her way back, Verid barely noticed her surroundings; the transit reticulum had to remind her gently to get off at the Nucleus. By the time she reached her office, she had made the inevitable decision.

The chief of security arose upon her holostage.

“The servo known as Cassi Deathsister must be detained immediately,” Verid told her. “Under highest security. I’ll file the necessary codes.”

The woman looked puzzled. “As you wish, Verid, but surely that’s outside my department.”

“She’s as bright as any human.”

“I see. Well then, we’ll have her cleansed right away.”

“No, by Helix.” Verid had not yet descended to that. “We need to... scan her first.”

A half hour later, she had her regular staff meeting with Hyen. She tried to report on her encounter, but Hyen was even less interested than usual. “That crazy logen has lived with his servo for over a century,” he told her. “Will you put your mind to straightening out those Sharers? And tell Sorl he can damn well keep his shonlings out of my office.”

“There are more like her,” Verid insisted. “I’m sure that there are. We’ll find out once we scan her. You know, we could end up like Torr.”

A voice interrupted her. “Security alert for the Subguardian.”

“Yes?”

“The chief informs you that the servo known as Cassi Deathsister cannot be found anywhere in Helicon. We will search the other cities and let you know what we find, Subguardian.”

Chapter 7

The Windclans were finishing a leisurely lunch on their Visiting Day. Sunflower was poking the baby’s tummy to make her giggle, while Hawktalon whistled away with Doggie.

“It’s just awful,” Raincloud told Blackbear with a sigh. “All of our friends on Kshiri-el—what must they think of us?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I wonder what our own families think of us back home. Have they heard all the nonsense about genetic engineering?”

Hawktalon announced, “We’re going outside to play.”

“Go ahead, Hawk,” replied Blackbear absently. The girl spent a lot of time exploring the streets lately, but the house could locate her anywhere.

From the bassinet Blueskywind’s giggles turned into a wail.

“Sunny, that’s enough now,” called Blackbear.

Raincloud got up and went over to take a look. As she caught sight of her mother, the baby immediately broke into a delighted smile, her body wriggling all over. Then her mouth made little puckering motions. “Hungry again, are we,” Raincloud observed. She could feel her milk letting down already, so she quickly hoisted the baby up to her fuller breast to avoid getting soaked. What a pleasure it was to relax and enjoy the baby without having to go somewhere.

But the pain of the Sharers’ fate would not go away. “We have to go see them,” she told Blackbear.

“What if they won’t see us?”

She thought a moment. “Blueskywind will need a checkup. She’s got cradle cap.”

“I’ve taken care of that, massaging the oil into her scalp.”

“Yes, but we’ll tell Yshri she has to check it.”

“Well we can’t go now. It’s swallower season.”

“The swallowers will have passed Kshiri-el by next week.” If Kshiri-el survived, she thought with a shudder. Of course it should; it was a young raft with no cracks in its branches.

The house announced, “Raincloud, dear, there’s a call for you.”

It was Verid. Raincloud switched the baby to the other breast and straightened her shirt, then went to the sitting room, holding the baby in one arm.

The holostage showed Verid in her office. Her eyes beneath her thick eyebrows looked sunken in; she seemed more tired than usual. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said, “but this matter is extremely urgent. I need to have your trainsweep ‘Doggie’ scanned immediately.”

Raincloud frowned. “She’s been scanned once already.”

“Our department is more thorough.”

“You won’t cleanse her?” Blackbear demanded.

“No,” Verid said, “but I can’t rule out the need to keep her in custody. I’m sorry; I can’t say more at this time.”

Raincloud did not like the sound of this, but she saw little choice. After the holostage had cleared, Raincloud spoke to the house. “Please locate Hawk and Doggie for us.”

“Are you sure that’s necessary?” asked the house. “They’re having such a good time.”

This was getting to be too much. “Look, House, it’s bad enough arguing with kids around here. I want that girl on the holostage right now.”

“Oh, very well. It may take a few minutes to find her.”

This comment was suspiciously inconsistent with the house’s previous knowing remark, but she let it pass. Close to ten minutes passed. It never took so long to locate someone, even in the opposite octant across Helicon.

At last the girl appeared, peering up from a holostage at a swallowtail garden. “Hi, Mother! We’re on our way home.” She sounded in exceptionally good spirits.

“Goddess, where have you been?”

“We met up with one of Doggie’s friends, a servo waiter named Chocolate because she says that’s what Elysians like to eat best. Oops; sorry, Doggie said I wasn’t supposed to tell.”

“I can see the chocolate ice cream around your chin.” No wonder she never was hungry when she came home.

“Anyway, Doggie said okay, she wouldn’t mind getting scanned again.”

Raincloud had not yet mentioned the scanning. “In that case, take her directly to the Nucleus. I’ll meet you there.”

“We’ll come, too, to keep her company,” offered Blackbear, straightening Sunflower’s trousers and wiping his face. “Doggie may get cold feet after all, like last time.”

At the Nucleus, the crayon-marked trainsweep seemed much quieter than usual. She moved along as ordered with barely a peep, not very different from the other little servos that carried Raincloud’s train.

“This may take a while,” the security agent told them as he placed the trainsweep in a box and put various electrical probes in place. “An hour, maybe two, if we come up with anything. We’ll call you when we’re done.”

“Since we’re out anyway,” Blackbear said to Raincloud, “why not take them to the circus?”

“We’ll get nothing else done,” Raincloud sighed.

The circus was well into the first act, but the children were thrilled to see the acrobats catching each other in midair like butterflies mating in flight. During the second act, Raincloud was called to the holostage.

“It scans clean,” the agent assured her. “It looks like a pretty ordinary trainsweep, to me.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “The last time, they found all sorts of curious connections in her network. They paid us a thousand credits.”

The man shrugged. “I couldn’t say. You know, that Subguardian has got a thing in her head about servos; she even tried to arrest one, like a human. It’s a running joke around here.”

Raincloud felt chilled but could not define her fears. When the circus was over, she took Hawktalon back to pick up the trainsweep.

“That’s all? Super,” the girl announced. “See you all later.” She started to head off down another street.

“Where do you think you’re going?” demanded Raincloud.

Hawktalon took a deep breath and held her lips shut. “I promised,” she said at last. “I have to take her back to see Chocolate. It’s the least you can do, after subjecting her to that ordeal.”

“It didn’t seem all that bad,” Raincloud muttered.

Blackbear added, “It’s nearly dinner time.”

“I’ll be back for dinner; I promise. If not, I’ll skip dessert.”

“You’ve had a week’s worth of desserts already,” Raincloud guessed. “If I catch you with any more ice cream, you’ll be grounded for a week.”

That evening, Hawktalon was back for dinner, and Doggie seemed her old lively self again. A rotten egg materialized with the dinner; Hawktalon, Doggie, and the house all disclaimed responsibility.

As promised, the generen marched all his shonlings to the Nucleus in their ankle-hugging jumpsuits to protest the expulsion of the Sharers. Cameras caught a couple of them doing cartwheels, but most managed to maintain the air of gravity appropriate to their mission. The importance of the event was such that the Prime himself had to receive them. In his best form, this time, Hyen praised the little ones for their little speeches and passed out sweets to all.

“He can manage children okay,” observed Lem ironically. “He hasn’t completely lost his grip.”

“None too soon,” agreed Verid. “Just wait till the hunger strikes start.”

At Alin’s place, Blackbear watched the report on the holo while resting up from a bout of rei-gi. Alin laughed at the good parts, especially the shocked look on the face of one of Hyen’s aides, whose train was trampled over by a couple of young stragglers hurrying to keep up with their line. Blackbear was not laughing, for he had taken a hard fall that felt as though all the carpals in his right wrist had ground together. Still in pain, he counted them gingerly to reassure himself.

“There’s got to be more we can do,” said Alin thoughtfully when the report was over. “It’s a disgrace. The Sharers were just at the point of agreeing to talk, when Hyen panicked and threw them out. We can’t go on like this.”

“Then why leave it to the kids?” asked Blackbear. “Your bankers should tell him. At least he won’t give them sweets.”

“Say, that’s not a bad idea,” said Alin, stroking his chin. “If all the major banks shut down for a day—I like it.”

Blackbear said nothing. He disliked confrontation; it always left him exhausted afterward. There was altogether too much confrontation in Elysium, all because they had no High Priestess to settle things.

Upon his return, he found an unexpected call waiting from Bronze Sky. Could it be Quail and his twins; or could it be Raincloud’s sister, about the new baby?

It was neither. It was the director of Founders Clinic, a personage whose hand Blackbear had shaken once at a ceremonial function.

“Doctor Windclan, I’m delighted to reach you.” The director spoke in urban L’liite with just a trace of Bronze Skyan accent. “One of our clinic alumni, across the light-years! These are exciting times for Bronze Sky.” He wore turquoise tights, his skin polished like amber, his black kinked hair brushed into an impressive bush, a style which Blackbear had never quite got used to. “I’m well acquainted with your work here, and your references are the highest.”

“Well, thanks,” said Blackbear, rather abashed.

“I understand that your main project there in Helicon has been derailed—through no fault of your own, of course. To get to the point: We’d like you to come home and run your own lab.”

“My own lab?”

“That’s what I said. You’ve learned the ropes there; why not run your own fertility project at Founders, emphasizing Bronze Skyan aims and needs? No more Elysian foot-dragging.”

“That would help,” Blackbear agreed. Then he felt a twinge of conscience. “Of course, Tulle is a brilliant researcher and she’s been generous to teach me.”

“Exactly, that’s why we want you. Furthermore, as you know, the House of Hyalite will be working with us closely to build and equip our research infrastructure. I am confident that we’ll attract the best talent in the Fold.”

“I see.” Blackbear knew that Bronze Skyan investors had bought out Hyalite, but he was unaware of these implications for development back home. “I will certainly think this over.”

“Excellent. Of course, I’ll send you the details. You know, Blackbear, I remember you at Founders, going back to be a village doctor; and now, look how far you’ve gone. We’re all real proud of you—and I hope your future’s with us.” The director signed out.

The last remark left Blackbear stunned. Of course, when Raincloud’s clan sent him off to medical school, he had intended just that, to come back to Tumbling Rock and spend the rest of his life tending earaches, arthritis, and broken bones. How exactly had he ended up out here instead? His own past seemed to blur before his eyes. Then he remembered Verid’s call to Raincloud; a transfold call, how extraordinary it had seemed then. And the video they had sent from Tulle’s lab, about the quest for fertile immortality. It was all Verid’s fault, he thought irritably. She had lured them here, to Elysium, which for all its technology was just another village.

And yet, if he had not been ready to hear and listen... It was his own fault, really, that he had left, escaping the world of infant earaches and dying old men. He felt a diffuse sense of guilt; he wished he could go home and hug Quail’s twins right away.

He told Raincloud of the clinic’s offer.

“It’s worth some thought,” she agreed.

“But how can we ever do it?” he exclaimed. “You don’t want to leave the Hills for good?”

Raincloud sat heavily into the couch, massaging her leg which had gotten a pull during rei-gi. The high-gravity satellite was a bit much for her, Blackbear thought, just three months after giving birth. “No, although...” She did not finish her sentence. “With a shuttle, it might not be a bad commute. It’s just across the continent.”

Blackbear absorbed this.

Raincloud added reflectively, “Mother complained in her last letter that too many city folk are moving into the Hills, to live there and work in Founders. But we belong there.”

He noticed her leg again. “Don’t you think that practice is too hard on you?”

She shook her head vigorously. “We can’t talk here,” she said, referring to the Urulan trip. “When we visit Kshiri-el to see the lifeshaper, I’ll bring you up to date.”

The sea was a blue mirror, merging almost imperceptibly with the sky. All the overcrowded raft seedlings had been cleaned out by the seaswallowers; all but a few lucky ones, to survive to maturity and perhaps support Sharer habitation some day. Raincloud caught sight of one, a brownish smudge some hundred meters out off Kshiri-el. But no, that was just a raft offshoot—the one where she herself ought to have gone, unspoken. She felt ashamed, recalling her promise to Morilla. So much progress, all gone up in smoke.

“Where is everyone?” Hawktalon wondered aloud.

“Sh,” whispered Blackbear.

The first adult they came across had turned white without speaking. Now the Windclans stood before Yshri’s silkhouse, uncertain what to do. It was even harder than Raincloud had expected.

The door panel dilated, and a child came out of the silkhouse. Recognizing Hawktalon, she asked, “Have you come to play again? Where’s Doggie?”

“Doggie’s gone visiting,” Hawktalon replied. “Where’s your old legfish?”

“Excuse me,” Raincloud put in, “could you ask the lifeshaper to see my child?” She took Blueskywind out of her pouch. “She’s due for a checkup, and her scalp has a disorder.”

“Sure, come on down.” The girl disappeared inside.

Exchanging glances, Raincloud and Blackbear followed the girl inside and down into the woody tunnels. “Don’t touch,” Raincloud warned Sunflower as she warily eyed the green tendrils that trailed down the walls, secretors of potent enzymes.

Sunflower looked around with interest. “What not touch, Mother?”

Yshri came to meet them. Without a word she took the infant and turned her over briskly. Blueskywind cooed and gave wide open smiles, seeming to recognize an experienced hand. Yshri bent one of the tendrils from the wall to frisk gently over her scalp.

“I’m sorry about... everything.” Raincloud’s greeting felt flat and leaden to her own ears.

“Lushaywen, we’ve missed you,” Yshri told the infant. “We’ve missed your mother too.”

“I tried,” Raincloud added lamely. “I thought we were getting somewhere.”

“The eighth wave crashes over all,” Yshri replied, a common Sharer saying. “Lushaywen, you’re welcome to join our next witness in the boats. We shall encircle Helicon.”

Raincloud turned hot, understanding that she herself was called upon. “You can’t do that,” she exclaimed. “It’s quite unsafe to approach the surface of a cellular city. You could be sucked underneath, or tossed overboard by an outflow current.”

Yshri handed the infant back to her. “Lushaywen, your mother will make a good Elysian.”

As they emerged to the raft surface, Raincloud blinked in the sunlight, still numbed by Yshri’s last words. Hawktalon and Sunflower scampered toward the branches at the water’s edge, while their parents followed more slowly.

“Tell me about Urulan,” Blackbear reminded her. “You promised to bring me up to date.”

Raincloud stopped. With difficulty, she turned her mind to the Urulan trip, a prospect which felt so distant now but was coming up too soon. She was not supposed to discuss it, but Blackbear deserved to know where his goddess and child would be.

Verid thought the new Imperator had consolidated his position; on what basis, Raincloud was unsure, for intelligence remained slim. At any rate, the invitation was firm. Their official aim was to commence disarmament negotiations; Zheron had actually offered to let them count missiles. But the main point was to see whether talk was possible—in other words, she thought grimly, whether they got out alive.

She sighed. “We go, three months from tomorrow.” Their disappearance would be disguised as a Foreign Affairs staff retreat. They could use a real one, she told herself wryly.

“Three months? You’ll never be in shape.”

She threw him a scornful glance. “I expect to be in top shape. The medics are inducing muscle growth to build me up for the extra bit of g-force.”

His mouth fell open. “What? That sort of treatment can wreck you for life.”

“This isn’t primitive hormone treatments; this is nanointelligent body tailoring. The sort of thing you came here to learn, right?”

“What if your bones can’t handle it?”

Raincloud smiled. “You sound like my father. Yet you’re the one trying to engineer embryos.”

“That’s different. This is for no good reason, just to visit that Goddess-forsaken planet.”

“Your friend Kal expects an entire planetful of immigrants to engineer themselves.”

“I never said I agreed with him.”

Ahead of them a legfish had appeared, hoisting itself by its flipper legs along a huge raft trunk. Sunflower started to run off after it.

Blackbear called after him, “Come back, Sunny! You’ll get too near the water.” Hawktalon obligingly ran ahead to catch him, although he yelled indignantly and tried to pry off her hand.

The legfish meanwhile was moving hastily on down the branch, avoiding the commotion. Suddenly it slipped overboard into the crook of a side branch.

A strangled yelp split the air. The legfish was thrashing upward again, trying in vain to escape from something. Its cries soon subsided amidst a turbulent mass of things writhing underneath, the water tinted red.

“Fleshborers,” Raincloud whispered. Her scalp crawled as she watched. The legfish must have fallen into a nest of fleshborers. She remembered the seaswallower she had seen them attack, that day she took Doggie out with Draeg. Yet they must take an occasional Sharer, too, despite the best repellents. What dangers lurked here, without so much as a medical hovercraft to count on. She thought of Leresha, her skin a patchwork of scars.

Something clicked in Raincloud’s mind. If the Sharers went out in their boats to witness, she would have to go with them, or else she could never face them again.

Chapter 8

Verid was reviewing one of Raincloud’s transcripts of a speech that Imperator Rhaghlan had broadcast to one of his provinces. In his speech, amongst various extravagant promises, the new Imperator vowed never to deal with any people who practiced fetal experimentation. She frowned, puzzled. Was this a serious sideswipe at Elysium, or merely empty hyperbole? She knew enough Urulite now to question Raincloud’s translation of “fetal”; the word meant “infant,” she thought, and of course nobody would experiment on human infants. Then again, in some texts the word referred to young animals. Was this Imperator an animal rights fanatic?

“Office, please, call Raincloud.”

“Yes, Subguardian.” Seconds passed; the office took an unusual length of time to reply. “Raincloud Windclan is unavailable at present.”

“Excuse me, please clarify.” It was not the Bronze Skyan’s usual Visiting Day.

“She is neither at the Nucleus, nor at her home. Shall I search all of Helicon?”

This was most unusual. “Ask her mate, first, at the Longevity Lab.”

Within minutes the reply came. “Her mate says she’s outside somewhere, visiting Sharers. Apologies, I have no more precise information available, Subguardian.”

“That will do.” If Raincloud could get the Sharers talking again, that was well worth her pay.

The holostage light winked out, but soon came on again. “Security call, Subguardian.”

Verid sighed dutifully. “Very well.”

Above the holostage her security chief appeared. “I want to inform you of a slight problem on the perimeter.”

“Yes?”

“We’ve got things in hand,” the woman assured her, “but since it’s Sharers, you ought to know.”

She gripped her desk. “Sharers? Where?”

Another image appeared, the outer wall of Helicon with the waves of ocean lapping up its face. A dozen little boats bobbed on the waves, nearing the sheer face of the wall, as if they intended—what?

“We’re trying to shoo them off,” the security chief assured her. “But you know how they are.” And there would be more.

“Cut down the speed,” Verid warned. If a single Sharer were hurt, the treaty itself could be called into question.

“There’s another awkward dimension, I’m afraid,” the chief added. “A member of your own staff is among them.”

The image focused on one of the boats.

It was Raincloud with her infant, her dark-faced gaze looking grim as death. Verid stared in shock. This was a gross breach of staff regulations. Raincloud’s security clearance would suffer; she would be disqualified for the mission to Urulan.

Over the day the Sharer boats increased to a hundred or more, bobbing around the wall of Helicon. Security dutifully sent servo hovercrafts to tow the boats out, but they soon returned. Some of their occupants dived out and actually swam to touch the wall, heedless of the treacherous current that passed as the city-sphere moved onward in its spiral path, designed to disperse heat. The swimmers were trickier to deal with than their boats, but again special aquatic servos removed them. No human Elysian would haul them off in person, of course; such physical confrontation in public would be unthinkable.

By the next night, the waves were lit up by “waterfire,” billions of luminescent microorganisms that multiplied after the swallower season. Still the boats and swimmers came, and the scene made spectacular viewing on holostages throughout Elysium.

The public reaction was intense. Even Iras, who generally took things in stride, was upset. “I don’t know what’s going on in Helicon these days,” she told Verid rather peevishly during one of their rare nights off together. “Even when old Flors was running things, we didn’t have the Sharers swarming after us.”

“I’m doing my best,” Verid snapped. “You know I can’t say more.” Her own communication with Hyen had deteriorated since Flors left. It was odd how Hyen respected her competence from a safe distance, yet could not bear to follow her advice close at hand.

“He just can’t work with women,” Iras concluded. “Except prone.”

Verid was inclined to agree. And yet, Hyen still backed her completely on the Urulan project. If only she could extricate a settlement out of the Sharer mess.

“Raincloud at least did the right thing,” Iras added.

It shook her more than she cared to admit, to see Raincloud out there. It seemed somehow to echo the disappearance of Cassi, who was by now presumably a “fugitive” out on a raft somewhere. “Why don’t you go join Raincloud?” she replied curtly.

“Well, the banks are prepared to go on strike,” Iras said, “in solidarity with our Sharer sisters.”

“Really.” Verid eyed her skeptically; the day the banks put their money at risk, let alone their employees’ skins, was a day she doubted to see.

Sure enough, the next day Bank Helicon and several other major Elysian firms announced a week-long shutdown of operations. Alin Anaeashon had inspired and organized the action, and he made a stirring speech. “Let the people of Elysium see that some logens are good for more than words,” he concluded.

Practically speaking, the bank shutdown was as “safe” as Verid had figured, for only Elysian offices took part, while extra personnel were moved to branches on Valedon. But for Elysians, whatever the banks did had enormous symbolic impact.

For another day, Verid did her best to assure all the foreigners that their deposits were intact, while urging Hyen to put an end to the crisis. “There has to be a treaty conference,” she insisted. “You can’t get around it. Do it now, before we lose trust altogether.”

Hyen shook his head impatiently. “I won’t give in to pressure. Our allies will only despise us.”

“It’s not a matter of ‘giving in.’ You know I’ll arrange things.”

“By Helix, it’s not a shon we’re running here,” Hyen exclaimed. “You forget that we face interstellar missiles. What will Urulan think of us, if we back down before a bunch of naked fish-women?”

Too exasperated for words, Verid did not reply. She got up abruptly and walked over to watch the caterpillars munching on the leaves of the passionflowers.

Behind her, Lem began to speak but was interrupted.

“An announcement, Guardians,” said the monitor. Guardian Papilishon has just called an emergency session, seconded by Guardian Dryashon. They will move for immediate rotation.”

The twelve Guardians in their golden sashes sat as usual around the outsized mooncurve of the table, the outlines of the holostages just barely visible upon its creamy surface. The air was electric; everyone was clearly awake, for once, and more than one gave furtive glances suggesting a wish to be elsewhere.

The Guardian Papilishon spoke first. “I move that the tide of Prime Guardian rotate immediately to the customary successor.”

A muttered “Second,” was heard. Much oratory ensued, denouncing Hyen’s handling of the Sharer crisis.

“You all have voted to approve everything I did,” Hyen reminded them.

“I did not,” Loris Anaeashon objected. “I did not intend to speak here, today,” the would-be successor added with false modesty, “but I must remind the Guard that I have consistently called for firm treatment of the natives.” He did not specify what that meant.

“I did not support our present course, either.” The voice of Jerya Tenarishon carried above the rest. “I offer a replacement motion—that we direct the Prime Guardian to initiate a treaty conference immediately.”

No one seconded her motion. Apparently Hyen was not the only one reluctant to “give in.”

Suddenly Jerya rose to face Loris, her sash glittering as she leaned forward, her hands on the table. “Why do you want this now?” she demanded. “You backed off, before. What have you cooked up now, that makes you so eager to run the show?”

“Not I,” replied Loris, his gaze sweeping across the others around the table. “I’m not at all eager to take the helm in such parlous times. But if others insist, I will consent, for the good of Elysium.”

The question was called. Guardians Dryashon, Inashon and Apaturashon voted in favor; Verid felt a chill behind her neck. But the next two voted against. Loris overcame his modesty to vote in favor, and Hyen voted against. The room was quiet now, as the Guardians waited, hands clasped upon the table.

Jerya hesitated purposefully. “I abstain.”

Verid clenched her hand. They always counted on Jerya’s support, but she had reached the end of her patience.

The vote continued, reaching four in favor, five against, with only Deliashon and Papilishon remaining. Guardian Deliashon cleared her throat. “It’s time for a change. I favor rotation.”

Then Hyen would lose, Verid realized with shock. A cold tightening passed through her to her toes. Their time was up; she could take the next shuttle back to Anaeon.

But before Guardian Papilishon could cast his vote, Jerya interrupted. “Excuse me, Guardians.” Her tone of voice made clear her distaste. “Upon reflection, I vote against.”

Hands and arms relaxed, and talars rustled against shoulders as people sat back, talking in whispers, even before Guardian Papilishon had cast his defiant vote. The motion had to carry by a clear majority; it had failed, but was hardly a victory Verid would care to celebrate. The Guardians seemed to think otherwise. Two of those who had voted to replace Hyen bowed to Jerya with congratulations, rather like shonlings relieved to see their generen take them in hand.

The next day, the bejeweled Valan ambassador appeared in person at Verid’s office, the first time he had done so since her promotion. “I must say, my people are getting worried about this crisis,” the ambassador confided, as if Verid had no idea that this might be the case.

“I understand, Lord Sardonyx,” Verid assured him. “We’re working night and day to resolve the matter.”

“Well you’d better do it soon,” he added, a bit imperiously. “Our houses of trade are deeply concerned about the banks. We can’t allow the slightest loss of confidence in our investments. We stand to lose billions in falling rates.”

“I’ve assured you, the banks are in absolutely no danger.” The ambassador ought to know Elysians better than that, she thought. “Our banks have been in business for centuries.”

“Yes, Verid,” he said, “you and I know that; but what if ordinary Valan investors start pulling out their accounts? Who knows where it might end.”

She sat forward and faced the man, her eyebrows raised. “So, let’s settle the crisis. What shall we do?”

“Hold a treaty conference, of course. What’s the matter—you always do that.”

She eyed him coldly. “That’s exactly what I tried to do, two weeks ago.”

“Well, go ahead and do it then. Talk all you like, that’s what the Sharers want. So long as they’re getting attention, they’re happy.”

“There’s no telling where it may lead,” she warned.

Lord Sardonyx waved his hand. “That logathlon is out of the news now. Whatever Sharers talk about makes no difference to us.”

He really was worried about the banks. And yet, Verid thought, something did not add up. Why had he waited till now, just after the challenge to Hyen? She wondered about it, after the Valan had left.

Then at once she saw. The Valans had held out, hoping for Hyen’s early downfall. With Loris, Elysium would move closer under Valan influence, for Loris held many Valan investments and he tended to share their outlook. In fact, the Valans must have tipped off Loris that they were ready to settle—else he would not have dared attempt to take over the Guard.

She found Hyen in a better mood than she’d seen in months. “Well, well, I think we can wrap this bit of trouble right up, don’t you?” He chuckled. “Foreigners are always so nervous about their cash. I think for once we owe a logen a great favor,” he said, meaning Alin.

“More than once,” she muttered, thinking of Jerya.

“So go ahead with the treaty conference,” he urged. “You said you could do it without losing face.”

“I’ll do my best, but the Sharers are pretty disgusted by now.”

“You’ll manage, you always do. Now perhaps we can move on to the matter of your staff retreat,” he said, meaning the cover for their trip to Urulan.

Before the subject changed, however, Verid shot Lem a glance, as she had coached him ahead of time. Perhaps Hyen would be more receptive to advice from junior staff.

“Excuse me, Guardian,” said Lem, “before we leave the question of Sharers and terraforming—”

“There’s no question about terraforming,” Hyen interrupted. “That’s settled. But go ahead,” he added generously.

“Of course, I’m new at this, but, I wonder how much the Solarian loan is really worth to us? It’s a drop in the bucket, as far as actual terraforming is concerned. Bank Helicon might sell off the investment, say, to a Bronze Skyan bank—they would pay more than it’s worth, just for the prestige of having it. Then the next time we get into... such things, we can cover our tracks better.”

Hyen looked at the man. He considered the idea, rubbing his hand beneath his chin. “You know, that’s just the kind of thinking we need around here. Verid, why didn’t you come up with that weeks ago?” He tugged Lem’s sleeve. “Why don’t I hear more from you, Lem? You need to loosen up more. You ought to join us at the Houris tomorrow night.”

So that one would fly, too. Only two problems remained: how to back down with grace, as Verid had promised, and what to do with Raincloud.

Out at sea, Raincloud was beginning to agree with Leresha. Four nights with Sharers at the wall of Helicon had altered forever her view of her Elysian hosts. Never in her life had Raincloud seen goddesses treated with such disrespect and indecency. To be carried off by eight-limbed swimming machines, without so much as a word of apology, while all the time their Elysian masters kept themselves safe and aloof in their prison-sphere of Helicon....

The Sharers took it all wrong, she thought. “The least you could do,” she told Yshri, “is to learn rei-gi and share-defend your honor. It might share no good, but at least you’d go down fighting.”

Yshri dipped a raftwood oar into the water. Little eddies formed and swirled away like microscopic seaswallowers. “You may be right,” she said, “but this is our way. You will see.”

Overhead, an amphibious shuttlecraft loomed closer, settling carefully to land on the water. Yshri eyed it with indifference, Raincloud with stony contempt. Waves from the landing rolled toward the boat and rocked it precariously.

“Raincloud Windclan,” called the shuttle. “The Subguardian wants to see you right away. You may board immediately.”

Raincloud looked away.

Yshri said, “Verid wants to talk. That’s a good sign, in my opinion.” Other Sharers disagreed; Leresha still unspoke all Elysians.

“I don’t like it,” Raincloud muttered.

“Well, I would go share with them,” said Yshri. “But someone has to row the boat home.”

“Oh, then, of course I’ll go,” Raincloud quickly agreed. As the shuttlecraft floated near, she hoisted Blueskywind onto her back and leaped onto the entrance ramp. The nanoplast soon oozed shut behind her.

“You can drop me off at the Third Octant entrance, please,” she told the shuttle. “I’ve got a few things to do first.” At the very least she had to reassure her worried family, wash the salt out of her skin, and let Blackbear redo all her tangled braids.

“So sorry, Citizen, that won’t be possible,” the voice purred. “Our instructions cannot be altered.”

A moment of fear hit her, intensified when an octopod met her at the entrance. It occurred to Raincloud, she had figured her job was lost—but was it worse? Was it a trap, coming back to the Nucleus? Her arms unconsciously swung to rei-gi position, and she held up her head with the look of the Goddess.

At the Nucleus, the Subguardian did not look particularly happy to see this mother and child, salt-encrusted like weeds plucked from the ocean. She sat straighter than usual, and there was not the usual trace of humor in her eyes. The Owl looked decidedly ruffled. “You can tell the Sharers we’ll have a conference,” she said without preamble. “It’s late, by Helix, I know; but better late than never.”

“‘Late’ is the least of it,” observed Raincloud. “It’s a total disgrace. Why should any of them listen?”

“They’ll listen to you. This is how we do things on Shora. Elysians and Sharers, we’re two very different kinds of people, remember.”

“Very different,” she agreed.

Verid clapped her hands on her chair. “Did we hurt a single one of them,” she asked, “even a single hair on their hairless heads?” Her voice was low but intense. “What other world do you know that handles differences as we do? Do you dare to sneer at us? You worked for Founders City; what kind of people are you? What’s the population of Bronze Skyan prisons—and the survival rate inside?”

Founders City was very far away just then, but Raincloud remembered.

“You’ll tell them to give us a week,” Verid went on. “A week after they withdraw, we’ll call a treaty conference. Later, we’ll quietly sell off the Solarian loan.”

Raincloud blinked incredulously. “You expect them to agree to that?”

“They will. At least some of them will. They won’t all agree to anything, before the next World Gathering.” Verid paused. “You’ll do it?”

She shrugged. “I’ll pass it on.”

The Subguardian visibly relaxed, her shoulders slumped back owlishly once more. “That’s settled then. Afterward, you’d better take three Visiting Days straight, since you’ve overrun your work week.”

Raincloud’s jaw fell. “You mean I’m still—but I haven’t been—”

Verid silenced her with a look. “Yes, you’ve been on the payroll all week. As ‘Sharer negotiator, special assignment.’ But,” she added, shaking a finger at her, “this is absolutely the last time I’ll cover for you. Understood?”

Raincloud said nothing, her head spinning.

“Why didn’t you warn me ahead of time,” Verid grumbled. “It would have made this a lot easier.”

Perhaps—or perhaps, Raincloud thought, a friendly octopod would have stopped by, and the shuttle would have refused to take her out that day. She realized with sadness that she no longer trusted Verid. But Verid had trusted her enough to keep her on; she owed her credit for that.

“When you come back,” Verid added, “you’ll find a raft full of intelligence to review. Our Urulite friends have managed to hit another Valan freighter.”

The Sharers agreed to call a treaty conference. Their boats took off immediately, their occupants happy to return to their children and fishing nets.

“Is that so wise?” Raincloud wondered, as Yshri departed. “What if the Guardians don’t keep their word? You’ll have to start all over.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Yshri assured her. “If it did, of course, we’d be back to share much worse.”

“It’s not right, though. The Elysians can pretend they lost nothing.”

“No one likes to share loss,” said Yshri. “No one likes to lose face. We have a saying, ‘Fish wear their scales, humans wear their face.’”

Raincloud thought this over, along with other thoughts all jumbled up inside her feverish brain. Back at the apartment, she gave way to exhaustion. As Blueskywind nursed in the crook of her left arm, her right arm fumbled through a drawer to find a clean nightshirt; perhaps, she thought irritably, it would be easier to ask the house to produce one.

Something stiff and white came out of the drawer. Her hand drew out a mask. It was the mask of an Urulite female, left behind in the haste of Lord Zheron’s departure so many months before. Idly she held it by the handle up to her face. There in the mirror she stood, masked, just like that masked goddess who had stepped out in her path to get a look at her.

The Urulites had just hit another Valan freighter, full of microwave generator components headed for L’li. The recollection of it came over her in a wave. Was it really the bad old days again? Would the secret trip be canceled after all?

Chapter 9

While Raincloud handled simultaneously the Sharer negotiations and the latest Urulite crisis, Blackbear’s work took a new direction. In the laboratory he had identified several novel mutants of his Eyeless gene. Two of them had control sequences that might prevent the early-onset heart disease in three-century-old Elysians. Pirin wanted to test them in simbrid embryos right away.

The call from his old clinic at Founders had renewed Blackbear’s enthusiasm for his work. Let the Elysians shut down their fertility work—in the long run, it made little difference to him, because he would set up his own lab on Bronze Sky. The main thing was to learn as many techniques as he could while he was here with the experts.

The simbrid embryo testing would be crucial, whatever problem he chose to work on. So he might as well work with Pirin on the Eyeless mutants. Their goal was to replace the Eyeless sequence on simbrid chromosome seven with one of Blackbear’s mutant sequences, then watch the embryo develop—normally, they hoped.

“How much DNA will you need?” Blackbear asked. He could program the synthesizer to build any mutant gene, a few thousand copies at a time.

Pirin considered this. “How many base pairs of your mutant differ from the parental sequence?”

“Twenty-three positions differ, over a region of three hundred bases.”

“That’s not too bad,” said Pirin. “Instead of cutting out and splicing the whole region, we’ll send in a molecular servo to modify each base chemically.”

That made sense. The four different nucleotide bases, or “letters” of the DNA alphabet, were chemically interchangeable except for the inward-pointing tab of each structure. The inward-pointing portions, which determined the DNA sequence, could be converted by adding or removing methyl and amino groups; rather like changing a c to an e by adding a stroke.

So the two of them spent the next half hour programming the molecular servos to perform the correct series of reactions, at the correct base positions. Since each servo could store only eight operations (there were atomic limits, after all) three servos had to be programmed, which took longer than Pirin had thought. But by the afternoon they were ready to put the servos into the fertilized egg cell to modify the chromosomal DNA.

They watched the tabletop holostage as it formed the image of the transparent egg. Within the sphere of granular cytoplasm, the two pronuclei were suspended, one each from the egg and from the disintegrated sperm which had fertilized it. Each pronucleus contained the parental chromosomes entwined inside, decondensed and invisible at this magnification.

From across the table Hawktalon leaned over to get a better look, her braids sparkling as they caught some of the light. “Daddy, did I really look like that once?”

He blinked, taken aback. “You certainly did.” Seven standard years ago that was, eight counting gestation. I’m getting old, Blackbear thought.

“Fertilization is not yet complete,” Pirin pointed out. “It will take several hours before the pronuclear membranes dissolve and the chromosomes migrate together. At that point, the chromosomes will condense for the first cell division. Once condensed, the chromosomes will be impenetrable. So we need to get the servos inside now.”

At Pirin’s spoken command, two microscopic needles pierced the cell, one for each pronucleus. Each needle pulled three molecular servos into the pronucleus. Of course, the servos could not be “seen” at this resolution, but the holostage gradually focused in. First the cytoplasm, with its reticulum of molecular transport enlarged, then fell away as the bubble of the nucleus expanded to fill the stage. Then the nuclear membranes and most of the chromosomes expanded out of range. “We need more contrast,” Pirin said. Another command, and the elegant curves of a DNA helix snaked across a foglike background. Blackbear made a mental note of this command.

“Do the servos find their own way to the proper gene sequence on the chromosome?” Blackbear wondered.

“That’s what we’ll find out,” said Pirin. “They should; they’re all programmed for that. Here we’ve focused on the Eyeless sequence. It shouldn’t take long for the servos to show up.”

Hawktalon asked, “Is that really a DNA gene?” She sounded disappointed. “Where are all the oxygens and nitrogens?”

“Atoms aren’t really colored balls on a stick,” Blackbear reminded her. “They’re just fuzzy clouds of electrons.”

Pirin looked up. “They can be colored balls, if you’d like.” At a command, the DNA turned into a winding collage of blue oxygens, red nitrogens, and tiny black hydrogens dotting the zigzag skeleton of carbon atoms.

“What’s that crawling alongside?” Hawktalon put her hand into the image. A chain of atoms shaped like a leech with a sucker on each end was creeping end-over-end along the major groove of the double helix. At one point it slowed to a halt, tapped several times about the groove, then settled and rearranged itself.

Pirin said, “That’s the nanoservo. It’s sitting at a cytosine base, the first one you wanted to mutate. The servo will replace the cytosine’s amino group with a hydroxyl, which immediately isomerizes to the ketone of thymine, the transformed base.”

Before Blackbear could speak, Hawktalon added, “You need an extra methyl group, too, to make thymine.”

“That’s right.” Pirin looked at her, rather surprised.

“She does her homework,” Blackbear said proudly. Then he frowned, puzzled. “Something doesn’t make sense about this. How can we ‘see’ all these molecules, as if they just sit there? Don’t they vibrate constantly, in Brownian motion?”

“Of course, molecules are never stationary, just as their atoms are not red and blue balls. What you ‘see’ here is a time-averaged representation of their electron density.”

Everything was a “representation,” at this level; nothing was what it seemed. Blackbear stretched himself, feeling vaguely disoriented to be immersed so deep in the realm of the unseen and untouchable. He remembered the surgical ward of the clinic, where reality was as concrete as a swollen worm of an appendix for his fingers to find and remove.

Then he had an idea. “You know, now that I’m getting into this project, I’d like to research the heart syndromes some more.”

“I’ll give you some papers to read,” said Pirin.

“I’d like to interview patients, too.”

“We have every patient on file, from holo recording to molecular composition of all their bodily fluids.”

“Great; that will help when I interview them.”

Pirin looked at him oddly. “Excuse me?”

Blackbear hesitated. His command of Elysian was fairly good by now. “I mean, visit the patients—talk with them, examine them. That way I’ll get a real feel for the disease; I might find some lost connections.”

“Oh, I see.” Pirin shuddered. “I suppose you could. Perhaps the... Perhaps Tulle might arrange it. I’m not sure what good it would do. We’re working at the molecular level, after all. Excuse me, I have another experiment to attend to.”

Astonished, Blackbear watched the Elysian student depart, his talar hung precisely across his smooth unblemished back. At the Founders clinic, even the research specialists regularly toured their wards. But here, he had not seen a patient in months. For that matter, he had never seen a sick Elysian.

By the next morning, each mutant egg cell had cleaved successfully into two identical cells. The twin speckled ovals hugged together, each with its nucleus like a crystalline marble floating inside. Blackbear watched, feeling a peculiar sense of beauty and shame, as if it might be a sacrilege to watch the work of the Goddess unfold under such a battery of instruments.

The next few cell divisions would each require most of a day to complete. They could not be “sped up,” as in the simulator, so there was nothing to do but wait for development to proceed over the next several months. By the third month, most serious defects would likely have appeared.

In three months Raincloud would be on Urulan—unless they called it off after this latest freighter attack. Blackbear shuddered. It did him no good to have so much time on his hands to think about things.

He needed to see patients. It had been such a relief to see the last of them, yet now he longed for someone to reassure with a kind word, or bring comfort with the right dosage. He needed to feel like a doctor again. He might not yet know enough to convince Pirin, but he could not escape the conviction that any approach from his lab had to connect somehow with actual patients.

From outside came Sunflower’s delighted peals of laughter. The toybox must have come up with something new to entertain him.

Something tugged at Blackbear’s trouser leg. Startled, he drew back from the egg in its nanoplastic womb and looked quickly down. He half expected Blueskywind, who loved to lie on her tummy and tug at anyone within reach. But of course the baby was off with Raincloud, helping negotiate with the Sharers.

It was Tulle’s capuchin trying to stick her nose beneath the hem of his trouser leg. The capuchin found his trousers a source of amusement; somehow she always seemed to think they must hide a treat somewhere, like one of Tulle’s pockets. Blackbear scooped the animal up and sat her on his hand, showing her the newly divided egg. “See there, little devil,” he told her. “What do you think? You once looked like that, too.”

The capuchin scampered down as Tulle entered the lab. “I hear all your eggs took,” said Tulle.

“So far,” Blackbear agreed. “We had to reinject the servos on one of them, but now they’ve all reached the two-cell stage.”

“Great start,” said Tulle. “If I were you, though, I’d try a couple of gene replacements, too. I know Pirin likes point mutations, but if the servos make one mistake, you waste months of development.”

“I see. Well, I’ll set one up then; I certainly need to learn that technique, too.”

“Pirin tells me you’d like to look at the disease in human patients.”

“Well,” he said guardedly, “I thought it might be useful.”

“It’s a very good idea,” she said. “We need to broaden our approach. The machines don’t know everything. I’ll make us an appointment at the Palace of Health.”

The Palace of Health was not in Helicon. It was located inside a large disk-shaped satellite that orbited the planet. The satellite’s rotation generated near-normal g-force at its outer rim. As Blackbear entered from the shuttlecraft, with Tulle and Pirin and the children, the first thing they did, of course, was to meditate at the butterfly garden. Blackbear left the children off at the garden with Doggie, with a holocube in Hawktalon’s hand and strict instructions to keep in contact with Dad.

Finding the entrance within the upcurving tunnel of the ring’s outer rim was a bit of a puzzle. Even Tulle seemed to have trouble locating a door with her groping hand. Pirin, who took his role as senior student very seriously, had dutifully come along but he hung back now, as if hoping Tulle might not find the door.

“May we enter please?” Tulle spoke at last, giving up.

The palest outline of a doorway appeared, just a glimmer of light tracing its arch. Above the portal a faint inscription appeared, in fancy Elysian letters similar to the inscription above Science Park. With some difficulty Blackbear made it out; not “Hope Abandons,” as he first thought, but “Hope Follows All Who Enter Here.”

From the top of the arch a furrow deepened and extended down to the threshold, as if the double doors were about to open. Then a servo voice spoke. “You are expected, Citizens, but one of you has no psychiatric exam on file.”

“He’s a foreigner,” explained Tulle. “Foreigners don’t require the exam. They’re used to morbidity.”

A moment passed. “You are correct. Please report my defect to...”

The doors parted, folds of nanoplast wrinkling along their inner edge. An attendant came to meet them, a blank-faced servo built somewhat like a waiter, wearing white instead of black. “This way, please,” the attendant spoke in the soothing tones of a shuttlecraft. “The first patient on your list inhabits a chamber with oxygen-enriched atmosphere. You will remain outside; however, if physical examination is required, I can assist.”

The patient’s chamber was located at an “upper” level, an inner ring of the satellite where the artificial g-force was so low that the visitors had to use handholds to steady themselves. They found themselves looking down at a sizable chamber of glass, within which a woman sat upon a floating cushion. From her shoulders a train of swallowtails drifted around her in a haphazard spiral. Arlen Papilishon was the name Blackbear had memorized from her file. The lowered g-force in her chamber was intended to reduce the strain on her heart, which had atrophied despite repeated transplants.

“Good morning, doctors.” From a speaker somewhere, Arlen’s firm voice replaced that of the hospital. “I hear the highest reports of you,” she added, for Pirin had dutifully called up the generen of each patient; few of them seemed to have mates. She rose from her seat and floated slowly upward toward them. Her eyes blinked rapidly, as if a sudden light irritated them. She was very thin, but appeared otherwise healthy and alert, her skin as smooth as Blueskywind’s.

The hospital told her, “You will be asked to undress for examination.”

“Undress? Now there’s something I haven’t been asked in a long time,” said Arlen ironically, “not by a human, at any rate.”

“I’d like to ask a few questions first,” said Blackbear. He could already see the obvious: the distended neck veins, the shortness of breath, and other symptoms typical of cardiomyopathy. “I’m Doctor Windclan; my mate will hear the highest reports. We’re researchers, you know, trying to cure and prevent your type of heart disorder.”

“Oh, you’re Doctor Windclan. I’ve already heard all about you, from Kal Anaeashon. He visits me every week.”

At that, all his questions flew out of his head. Flustered, he turned over a page in his notes, trying to avoid the eyes of his colleagues. “Uh, could you tell me, first off, how’s your digestion?” He asked what she thought of her diet, whether she slept well, whether she had chest pains. Beside her a beverage cup and a holocube gradually descended. As the patient answered his questions, a jumble of figures from her file passed through his head: her pulse rate was high, her heart chambers were atrophied and misshapen, her blood contained abnormal cardiac enzymes, and several of the thirty-six different classes of white cells were low. Blackbear relaxed and felt quite the physician again, while Tulle and Pirin stood by listening.

“Is there anything at all that bothers you,” Blackbear asked the woman, “aside from your heart? Any aches, joint stiffness, anything?”

“I ache to get out of here.” Her eyes blinked rapidly again.

A rush of recollection came over him, for how many patients on the chronic ward at Founders would have said the same. He regarded her with warm sympathy. “What about your eyes?” he asked. “Any vision problems?”

“No, but I will have if they keep the light this bright forever. I don’t know why the light’s so bright in here.”

The hospital told Blackbear, “The patient exhibits certain delusions; see her file.”

“Well you could still check her eyes out,” Blackbear replied.

“It will be done, Doctor.”

“A pleasure meeting you, Doctor Windclan,” Arlen called out to him. “Do stop by again, one of these decades. Or send your great-grandson, someday.” For generations she could float there in that near-weightless balloon.

When the exam was completed, the attendant led them away toward the next patient, catching the handholds one by one. For a minute or so, the three researchers were silent. Blackbear recalled Kal’s offer, to take him to visit the “defective” Elysians.

“That Kal,” said Pirin scornfully. “How like him, to prefer the dead to the living.”

“But that patient’s not dead,” Blackbear exclaimed. “With all your transplantation technology, why can’t she be cured?”

Pirin looked offended. “Nothing’s perfect.”

“You saw her file,” Tulle reminded him. “She’s had half a dozen transplants. They all go bad. Some regulator response is messed up, something outside the heart that acts upon it. That’s just what you’re trying to work put.”

“Where do all these transplanted organs come from?” he wondered. “You don’t seem to have all the transit crashes that we do back home.”

At that, Pirin gave him a very odd look indeed. “The organs come from simbrid embryos, of course.”

He froze in his tracks. So Elysians grew up those near-human fetuses for more than medical research. Human enough to transplant, but not enough to be born as infants.

Tulle paused, looking back to him.

“I was just wondering,” Blackbear said, as he walked on more slowly, “whatever would happen if one of those simbrids happened to be ‘born.’”

“That couldn’t happen,” said Pirin. “Anyway, it would only produce an indecent sort of animal.”

“It might be intelligent.”

Pirin laughed. “Intelligence isn’t everything. Servos are intelligent.”

Tulle considered this. Beyond her, the blank-faced attendant was about to introduce the next patient. “Society needs limits,” she said quietly. “We make sure the simbrids aren’t born, for the same reason we cleanse our servos.”

Chapter 10

The loss of the second Valan ship filled the news for over a week. Since no actual footage was available from this latest event, the news replayed old recordings of Imperial nuclear attacks on their provinces, in case anyone needed a reminder of Urulite savagery.

In a surprise appearance, Lord Zheron broadcast a speech across the Fold. Now elevated to the post of Imperial Grand Vizier, Zheron gave a remarkably frank account of the incident. “The Imperator had not the slightest intent to harm a single Valan barbarian on their stinking spy ship. Our regional commander of the Imperial Fleet was under orders only to follow the ship until it passed well beyond Imperial space territory. Unfortunately, a rogue ship of an enemy of the Imperium destroyed the Valan spy ship, intending to discredit His August Majesty the Imperator. The inhuman perpetrators of this treasonous deed will be eliminated! That is, brought to trial.”

Inside Verid’s office, the statement with its translation floated in bright letters above the table. Raincloud was pointing out the nuances. “An ‘enemy of the Imperium’ generally means a personal enemy of the Imperator,” she noted.

Lem nodded. “Not surprising, given all the claimants Rhaghlan had to eliminate. They must have hundreds of supporters still at large.”

The three of them reflected silently on the implications for stability of the new regime.

“Was it really a spy ship?” Lem asked.

Verid shrugged. “Any Valan ship passing so close to Urulite space probably carries a spy or two.”

“So what are the Valans going to do about it?”

“They’ve already demanded a session of the Fold Council to authorize a space blockade. This can be done by generating white holes at those jump stations essential for Urulite vessels to cross the Fold.”

Raincloud blinked. “But if Urulan is closed off, how will we be able to—”

Both Verid and Lem stared at her, hands raised. No one was to mention the Urulan trip, even in the security of Verid’s office.

“Of course it would make no practical difference,” Verid said loudly, “since no one in the Fold visits Urulan. Nonetheless, given our Elysian emphasis on the long-term view, we would prefer a more judicious response.” She waved a hand above the table, and the floating letters disappeared. “I think I’ll handle the Valan demands. A few minor Valan indiscretions might come to light; we save them for just such occasions. Now, about our friends at Kshiri-el. Any progress?”

With difficulty Raincloud shifted gears in her head. She had spent her last couple of days at Kshiri-el “negotiating” with Yshri, while studying Urulite documents all night; it was enough to make her head spin. “Mostly all Yshri wants to talk about is how people could lifeshape themselves for a new planet,” she summarized. “Then Ooruwen comes in and tells us it’s hopeless, and nothing but total abandonment of the project will do.” Ooruwen was just as capable of colorful language as Zheron. “I get the feeling there are as many opinions on this as there are Sharers.”

Verid grinned, and her shoulders shook as she chuckled. “I think you know our good sisters well. Still, it’s a shame that Leresha won’t come back to talk. She would have woven something together.”

Considering Leresha’s views, Raincloud thought that whatever she wove together would be unlikely to please the Elysians.

The Fold Council declined to block Urulan’s jump stations, but they called for monetary compensation. The figure demanded was high, and the vote passed by a large margin; only Elysium abstained, to the withering scorn of Valedon and other Fold members.

From Urulan, the demand met silence. Well deserved though it was, Raincloud suspected even a tenth that amount might be hard for the impoverished Imperium to come up with.

Over the next two months, Raincloud spent more and more of her Visiting Days inside the high-force satellite, training with Lem and Iras. With regular medical treatment, her muscles swelled to an alarming extent; her sleeves no longer fit, and she felt afraid to hug the children, lest she squeeze too hard.

“Enough of this,” she told Iras one day as they swung their arms before practice. “I know those Urulites grow biceps to rival Black Elbow, but any more will just block my movements.”

“I’ve noticed that.” Iras had grown her flesh a bit, too, although not so much as Lem, who had allowed his thighs and upper arms to expand until he looked almost gross.

“Let’s work on multiple attacks today,” said Raincloud. Even with her added muscle mass, an Urulite fighter could well outweigh her twice over, so the best she could do to simulate was to take on two at once. “We’ll start with an easy one. You both grab my arms from the front, aiming to pin me. I’ll respond with a hip pull, and you’ll both end up on your backs on the floor.”

Iras thought it over. “I see, a double ‘Falling Leaves.’”

Lem still looked skeptical, but the two of them stepped into position. Raincloud bent at the knees to lower her center of gravity and let her shoulders relax. This would take concentration; thank Goddess the two of them were good enough by now so that she no longer had to worry how they fell.

They sprang at her at once, each catching one of her forearms, which she had carefully turned down. She bent low, her hips moving back, while her arms swung theirs into alignment together. Then her torso thrust swiftly forward beneath the four arms; a pivot to the right propelled the arms back, still along their original path of momentum. The attackers’ bodies naturally followed their arms, rotating to fall on their backs on the mat. A resounding thud echoed through the practice room. Raincloud finished the move by twisting both their arms to the mat, taking care to keep them intertwined. The “leaves” had “fallen,” all right. For a moment there was silence, filled only by her heart pounding heavily inside.

“Great job,” said Raincloud enthusiastically. “You both fell just right. You really know what you’re doing now.”

“Do you think so?” Iras asked, as she got herself up and clapped the dust off her hands. “Will we put on a good show for our... friends?”

Raincloud considered this. The Elysians had trained at an astonishing rate, to within two levels of the top form reached by a Clicker goddess, perhaps within one level in the case of Iras. Raincloud took care to avoid teaching Lem certain moves which only a goddess was supposed to know; it might make no difference here, but she was still traditional about some things. At any rate, she had little doubt that they could show their Urulite hosts a thing or two. “I think that... Hyen’s friends will be impressed.”

To explain their activities to the public, Hyen had scheduled the three of them for a private exhibition at the Houris the week after their secret trip. The sleazier news networks were already speculating.

The next month passed with little movement in Sharer negotiations, but in Helicon there were disquieting signs. The streets were not quite so clean as usual; in fact, they were marred by little tumbleweeds that seemed to have come from nowhere. The tumbleweeds rarely grew larger than one’s fist, but their tough interlocked branches caught in trains and in hair, and they clogged even the streetcleaners.

“They multiply faster than the cleaners can be unclogged,” Iras told Raincloud. “At this rate, they’ll smother the butterfly gardens. Let’s hope Verid does something.”

Raincloud was surprised. “What’s Verid got to do with it?”

“Why, it’s a ‘gift’ from the Sharers, of course. Just like the fruit flies—their classic tactic.”

“Yshri wouldn’t do such a thing.” But even as she spoke, Raincloud knew that Iras was right. Enough Sharers on other rafts were still mad at Helicon. The “negotiations” were useless without their support.

At home, Blueskywind could creep across the floor with surprising speed, especially when she caught sight of her favorite rubber squid. The squid was a gift from Draeg, a typical tourist toy from Shora. It was just the right size for her to stuff it between her gums, mouthing it all over, limbs and all.

Awake now most of the day, the baby babbled incessantly, long “Ah-ahs” and trills. Once she caught on to the “click” sound of the Clicker language, it caught her fancy for some reason, more than it had for her siblings. She practiced the click and exaggerated it, with Hawktalon’s encouragement, until it became a loud “Pop!” as she pulled her tongue out from the palate under pressure. When put down to nap, she would “pop” noisily to amuse herself until at last she fell asleep—much to her parents’ relief.

From Bronze Sky Nightstorm wrote that Falcon Soaring had her baby; that is, Raincloud’s sister Lynxtail had given birth two months before, and by ritual of the Goddess had transferred the child to her cousin. The news reopened a wound, leaving Raincloud depressed. Blackbear worried more about the fire season. The fires were lasting longer than usual, in an exceptionally dry year, and had already claimed half of Tumbling Rock. His own brothers’ village kept a nightly watch, just in case the fire burned their way and they would have to flee to Crater Lake.

Snake Day came again, just one Bronze Skyan year since they arrived in Helicon. Hawktalon dressed up the Goddess figure in paper snakes, and, much to her delight, Raincloud had actually borrowed a real live blacksnake from Tulle’s preserve. It must have fed not long before; it hung itself torpidly along the black glazed arms, flicking its tongue now and then.

The trip to Urulan, disguised as a staff retreat, was less than a week off now, unnervingly near. Blackbear gave her one of his dark looks. “You’re still going?”

Raincloud clenched her hands. “I can hardly dishonor the Snake.” Since the latest freighter “accident,” Blackbear was dead set against her going; the fact that they could not discuss Urulan directly only made things worse.

Verid called her in for one last review of their protocols and their negotiating plan. The two conferred on a ship in the outskirts of the solar system, where security could be maximized.

“The opening script is clear,” Verid reminded her. “Zheron expects you to fight the Imperial Champion ‘to the death.’ I tried to get this part waived, but he insisted on it.”

“I understand.” The Elysians would not have to risk their millennial bodies. “At least it’s not the Imperator himself; since he’s a ‘god,’ I would have to lose.”

“The ship will have full medical facilities. But don’t push it, by Helix; I’ll need you afterward in one piece!”

She smiled ruefully. “I’ll do my best.”

“Keep in mind,” Verid said, “our main aim is to find out what they want, what they think they need, to make peace with the Fold.”

“And commit them to disarmament.”

“If possible; we’ll see how much we can do in one visit. Remember, this encounter will be a big shock to the common Urulites. To face something as big as the Fold—bigger than their gods.”

Raincloud had some idea what that meant. She recalled Nightstorm’s remarks about “chromosomes.”

“The young Imperator is the key to everything,” Verid added. “He has to want to work with us.”

She nodded. “Rhaghlan wants peace and trade, and even democracy someday. He will liberate women and slaves.”

“He opposes abortion, though,” Verid added. “He gave a whole speech about that. Are you sure he meant ‘abortion’? Our previous translators would have rendered that ‘baby-killing.’”

“Urulites do not distinguish between the two,” Raincloud explained. “If a man’s wife conceives a child whom he can’t support, or if he doubts its paternity, he may order it terminated before birth, or after birth he may hold it under water, to preserve his honor. Since females have no honor, they are not permitted to do this.”

Verid thought a moment. “So for Rhaghlan to oppose ‘baby-killing’ is rather enlightened.”

“I wish all his views were so enlightened. He remains rather obsessed with ‘pure blood,’” Raincloud pointed out. “There are reports that he has imprisoned and possibly executed people for questioning his own godly descent.”

“That’s unfortunate, but not surprising,” Verid said. “His mother, though a lady of high rank, was not a queen; his enemies are bound to exploit it.”

For some minutes the two fell silent. They had gone over everything so many times.

“Raincloud, I want you to leave the baby home.”

She stared, for a moment breathless at this sudden turn. “We had that settled,” she exclaimed. “I told you, I can’t let her go without nursing. You said she could come, so long as she stays with Iras while I’m on duty.” Iras’s nominal role on the trip was to “introduce” Verid, as her mate; on the side, Raincloud figured, she would scout out business prospects.

“I know,” Verid said, “but I’ve had second thoughts about nonprofessional participants. This Imperator may mean well, but he can’t guarantee our safety.”

“Only Elysians would expect that,” said Raincloud with frank disgust. “The baby goes where I go.”

“Your mate feels differently.”

At that Raincloud was too enraged for words. How dared Verid spy on her at home with Blackbear. She took a deep breath. “Your own mate disagrees with you,” she said coldly. “Yet she’s coming.”

Verid looked away. “Iras will stay home, if your baby does.”

Now Raincloud understood. Verid feared for Iras, too. “Let Iras stay home, and live a thousand years. My daughter has her honor to think of.”

Chapter 11

The spaceship had the same close-fit quarters as the ship that had carried the Windclans out from Bronze Sky. Raincloud could scarcely escape the sense that she was heading home, instead of toward the dreaded Urulan. “Little Lushaywen,” she whispered in Sharer to her wide-eyed child. “How could I ever have imagined then what sort of journey we’d share now?”

The baby felt heavy in her arms, for the ship had already set its gravity to Urulite standard. The extra acceleration would speed their journey, too, though it made little difference nowadays. From the travelers’ perspective, their trip would take barely a day, mostly at near-lightspeed, with a jump station every hour or so. Back at Shora, over a week would elapse; then another week, after their three-day stay. Of course she could not have left the baby so long.

Still, better a week than twenty years. The Heliconians long ago had discovered that this lobe of the galaxy, called the Fold, was multiply folded on top of itself in one of its twenty-three dimensions, rather like a scarf folded up in a pocket. A jump station was a place where sufficient energy was concentrated to poke a hole across the fold, like a needle poking through a fold of the scarf. Today modern ships could thread in and out of the jump stations, taking shortcuts all the way to Solaria, a world on the farthest edge of the Fold.

“Last chance for second thoughts, Citizens,” Verid announced as they reached their final jump station.

Lem laughed. “Wasn’t this the one the Valans tried to shut down?”

Raincloud frowned at the heavy-handed jest. Then she turned her baby over to the nana for a diaper change.

The jump station appeared as an elliptical shape, absolutely black against the stars. Once the ship entered, it would start to spin at an exceptional rate, and the interior would experience high g-forces. So, as usual, all passengers reported to the central axis of the ship where they would strap down in order to pass through safely. Raincloud strapped her baby down, too; a bit of a trick in the near-weightless condition, but after all her travels she had grown accustomed to the straps and buckles floating off unpredictably, and the sense of confusion in her inner ears. She settled back calmly and stretched. A holostage was situated conveniently to provide what passed for Elysian entertainment.

The transition began smoothly enough. As the pressure increased, like a hand pushing her back, she took deep, regular breaths. The pressure gradually reached its maximum, about three or four g’s she guessed.

But instead of declining, the pressure rose again. The hand on her chest was now a lead blanket grinding her cruelly into the cushions that were supposed to protect her. She strained for air and tried to cry out for her child, but no sound escaped. An oxygen mask came over her face; that was the last she remembered.

When she revived, she ached in every muscle. Servo medics hovered over her and the other passengers, whisking tubes and sniffers here and there. Blueskywind was screaming at the top of her lungs, probably because she felt as sore as her mother did. Raincloud tried to calm her down enough to nurse. That jump was a bad one.

“Emergency alert, Citizens.” The ship itself was one great servo, which piloted itself without human assistance. “This jump station has not been well maintained; a gravitational anomaly stressed our equipment on passing through. The craft has sustained significant damage.”

The passengers exchanged looks. Iras caught Raincloud’s sleeve to reassure her.

Verid asked, “Will we be able to get back out again after our mission?”

“I can’t say for sure,” the ship told her. “I will run all necessary checks.”

“Good,” Verid snapped. “Inform me as soon as possible, please.”

Lem was no longer laughing. “Those primitive bastards,” he muttered. “They can’t even keep up their jump stations.”

“Well what do you expect, with the Fold boycott against them?” asked Raincloud.

“Exactly,” Verid agreed. “It’s a wonder they keep up anything at all.”

Iras was watching the viewscreen. Her lips parted, and she pointed at a small yellow disk that stood out against the field of stars. “Is that... ?”

“That is Urulan’s sun,” the ship confirmed. “One point two standard mass, spectral range—”

“Very well,” Verid interrupted. “Any contact from our host yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Satellites out?”

“The satellites have been launched, Citizen.” The spy satellites were to be released immediately to count Urulan’s missiles—before Zheron or anyone else might change his mind. “Warning,” the ship added, “my sensors already detect traces of radionuclear debris. If these emanate from the planet Urulan, my calculations suggest you will all require cancer prophylaxis.”

“Great Helix,” muttered Lem. “We’re visiting a graveyard.”

“Contact!” called the ship. “An approaching vessel requests immediate contact—”

“Granted,” Verid quickly replied.

Before the viewscreen, the holostage filled with light. An image wove in and out, then settled at last.

It was Lord Zheron, as big as life. The burly oversized dwarf of a man had changed little; his blue tunic was layered over with chain mail, and weapons of every description bristled from his belt. He slapped his leg emphatically. “Lord Raincloud! You owe me one,” he reminded her. “I’m onto your tricks; you won’t get me outside the ring again.”

Verid cleared her throat. “Grand Vizier,” she greeted him carefully. “It is an honor to meet you once more.”

“His Majesty the Imperator awaits you. Prepare ships for docking.”

A phalanx of octopods emerged from the back of the Elysian ship, mainly to impress the natives, Raincloud thought. Zheron could easily obliterate their ship if he chose. As the two ships locked on, the nana came back with Blueskywind.

Raincloud turned to Iras.

“I’ll take good care of her.” Iras had some knack with babies, after her years with Verid at the shon. Meanwhile, Raincloud figured that since she herself was the designated “male” for this trip, she had best leave the little one to others at least until after their royal introductions. What a sight one of those Urulites would make if he suddenly found himself in Tumbling Rock—childless, and bristling with silly pointed things. How the goddesses would laugh and speculate as to why he needed more than one.

Zheron’s soldiers soon boarded, all of them about Elysian height yet twice as wide, their eyes bright blue, their hair straight and sand-colored. Zheron himself and his weapons master, Lord Dhesra, now the Imperial Master Armorer, both clapped her on the shoulder and exclaimed at how long ago they had last seen her. Raincloud recalled Dhesra’s frank remarks on what ought to become of certain Imperial retainers.

The soldiers’ search of the vessel took longer than expected, in part because they seemed intensely curious about even the most mundane details of the Elysian ship, down to the little cleaner servos that scurried out to wipe the dust from their shoes. The men smelled as if they could use a cleaning, too. At any rate, Raincloud took the chance to sneak in one more nursing of the baby before she fell asleep. Caressing Blueskywind’s forehead one last time, she handed her over to Iras. The three of them rejoined Verid and Lem as they transferred to Zheron’s ship, leaving their own ship to park above Urulan’s equator.

The Urulite interior reeked of must and machine oil, and other smells best left unidentified. The floor hummed unnervingly underfoot. The bridge was full of manual switches and packed with men slamming controls and shouting back at the instruments when they disliked the response. Nonetheless, Zheron was immensely proud of his vessel, and he insisted on giving the Elysians a full tour, thumping the back of each crew member as he announced his job. Raincloud caught a glimpse of Lem’s face, rather pale; she suspected he felt sick.

By the time they reached the viewscreen, Urulan itself was in view: a lovely orb with patches of continent and ocean free of cloud, like Valedon, only greener. The Elysians transferred to a shuttle and descended through the atmosphere, a greenish sky gathering above them.

Below rose the famous “needle rocks” of Urulan. The dark brown mountains jutted spectacularly out of a dense green ground cover, casting shadows for several kilometers. Even though she had known intellectually what to expect, Raincloud’s heart pounded harder the nearer they came.

All the while they descended, she translated for Zheron as he held forth on the past two millennia of Imperial history, starting with the birth of the first Imperator to the gods Azhragh and Mirhiah. Most of the history was familiar to Raincloud from her studies with Rhun; the few unfamiliar details she suspected were made up for the occasion. The shuttle was even more cramped than the spaceship had been, and as Zheron gesticulated, his arm occasionally brushed the chain mail of the pilot, who was doing his best to bring them in for a safe landing.

Suddenly Zheron flung out his arm toward the window. “Look there, below—a ‘caterpillar.’ You’ve heard, yes? One of our native fauna welcomes you to Urulan!”

Raincloud looked. A dense canopy of foliage could be seen, and she could just make out something moving.

Zheron pounded the pilot on the back. “Give them a closer look, will you?”

The shuttle dipped and swayed. Raincloud felt her stomach float up toward her lungs; she swallowed hard and gripped her armrests. The ground expanded and loomed upward toward them, until individual trees could be made out.

There it was, a “caterpillar,” a monster like two elephants back-to-back with seven pairs of limbs in all. As if on purpose, its front two limbs happened to lift up just then, giving a full view of the caterpillar’s mandibles; for a moment the shuttle seemed about to fall into them. Then the craft zoomed upward, tugging at her seat until it leveled off once more in the relative safety of the sky.

Raincloud took a deep breath. Reaching over, she gently caressed a black curl on the forehead of her daughter, sound asleep on Iras’s shoulder. Behind her Lem’s pale face had turned green.

The Imperial City of Azure arose upon a cluster of the needle rocks, linked together by delicate arched bridges that traced pale blue against the clear sky. The palace buildings consisted of round turrets with ledges that wound upward around them, like spiral ramps. Gold leaf lined the edges which caught the sunlight, winking in and out.

Below the city, farmlands descended in terraces, ending abruptly at a stone wall that traversed the girth of each needle rock. Only the surface of each needle rock had been treated for human agriculture. Eyeing those few precious bits of soil on slopes so steep even Clickers would hesitate to till, Raincloud guessed that Urulites might well wonder where their next meal would come from, for all the gold on their palaces.

The shuttle landed with surprising grace; that pilot must have known his business after all. An icy wind whipped across the grass, enough to make her welcome her goatskin jacket. Two columns of guards saluted them with horns. The guards rode Urulite llamas, sleepy-eyed beasts with long necks and elephantine legs, specially bred to withstand high gravity. A cart drawn by llamas drove up to bear the visitors to the Central Palace. The road was steep and full of cracked flagstones. The beasts’ performance impressed Raincloud. She could use some of that stock in her fields back in Tumbling Rock.

When they reached the Central Palace, no one needed to be told. The structure was hard to believe, despite all the images Raincloud had seen. Gold covered all the outer wall and spiral ledge, with countless figures of the gods worked in bas-relief, inlaid with turquoise. Raincloud blinked and had to look away as the reflected sunlight hit her eyes. Only as the visitors approached closer could she see that some of the gold leaf was flaking off without replacement, and that ominous pockmarks marred the wall.

The carts stopped. Dhesra muttered, “This guard will show you to the ladies’ quarter.”

Taking her cue, Iras stepped out with the baby, an octopod behind her. Raincloud anxiously watched them disappear behind the Palace.

An enormous pair of double doors swung back, on hinges thicker than Raincloud’s arm. As they dismounted from their cart with their octopods, Verid and Lem unfolded their trains, shortened to avoid need of trainsweeps. Zheron and Dhesra led them all into the Hall of the Azure Throne.

Zheron’s demeanor underwent a marked change, Raincloud noticed. He seemed tense as a drawn bow, his eyes turning back and forth as if alert to the slightest deviation from protocol. Footsteps echoed on the marble floor as they strode forward between the lines of warriors. At either side of the hall rose columns covered with ornate decoration. She noticed, though, that some of the corners could have used a good cleaning, and that fissures and discolorations marked the floor.

They crossed the hall, nearing the black edge of the traditional Ring of Death. Behind the ring stood the Azure Throne, pale blue stone with golden symbols full of countless ancient meanings. Vessels of incense at either side released exotic odors. Beyond the throne rose richly patterned curtains; Raincloud guessed that the higher ranked ladies of the court waited behind.

A salute of drums and horns announced the pending entrance of the Imperator. At this point, visitors normally were supposed to bow low to the ground until the royal personage took his seat. The Elysians had debated for hours whether or not to do so, given the democratic principles of the Fold in general and Elysium in particular. At last they had settled on a limited bow from the waist, approximating the Elysian gesture of respect; Zheron had assented, observing with irritation that if Elysians all had bad backs, he would have to make allowances.

So Raincloud bowed, while Verid and Lem beside her did the same. Then she looked up.

In the throne sat a man who looked just like her old teacher Rhun. There was no mistaking the thin lips, the huge dark brow, the forehead sloping up into coarse black hair. Imperator Rhaghlan was a sim.

Raincloud froze as she stared. For a moment time seemed to stand still. Rhun—and yet not Rhun, of course, not the ghost from her past. A sim nonetheless; by the Goddess, how did he manage to keep the throne? No wonder that devil Zheron had blustered about blood.

She caught herself, hoping her shock had not registered. Of course, she was an idiot, for Zheron had warned them in his own inimitable way.

Beside her Verid and Lem kept admirable composure. Some sort of announcement was being made, which she hurried to interpret for them. Just how many Urulites had simian blood in their veins...

“In the name of the Urulite Imperium,” Lord Dhesra was saying, “the Imperial Champion challenges the barbarian Lord Raincloud to fight to the death!”

A giant of a man entered the marble Ring of Death. Tall even by Bronze Skyan standards, his girth was like that of a tree trunk. There was no trace of sim in him. His back was erect, his face round, and his eyes blue as twin moons.

“Choose your weapons, Barbarian Lord,” added Dhesra.

Raincloud exchanged a quick look with Verid. Verid’s eyes were impassive. She replied, her voice reverberating strangely in the vast hall. “In the name of the peaceful people of Elysium, I ask for spirit only.”

Soldiers muttered at this, and one of them banged his spear on the floor as if to object. It occurred to her, these men might never before have heard the name Elysium in the context of peace. Still, their leaders ought to have prepared them better. It was hardly a good sign.

The Champion merely nodded and handed his own sword and particle blaster to an attendant. Raincloud swiftly sized him up. Perhaps three times her weight, he left little room for error. One swipe of his arm might be enough to clear her across the line—and marble was not a nice place to fall. For once she longed for the infuriating Elysian servo medics.

On the other hand, this fellow could hardly change direction once he got moving. That was the key to rei-gi, if only she could get him pointed the right way.

She stepped forward easily, her arms swinging lightly, as if she were inattentive. In fact she watched the man closely, trying to see where he flexed his limbs in response. He did not move much; he did not try to make her circle back, as Zheron had cleverly done. She drew closer, just outside his reach, she estimated. He would have to make the first move, but he seemed in no hurry to do so. Why should he, when any move she made would merely bounce off him?

A sword clanged loudly, off to her left. Raincloud turned her head, as if distracted; in fact, her peripheral vision was well trained.

The man fell for it. Out of the corner of her eye she saw his fist coming, nearly the size of her head. With her right foot she stepped forward to meet him, then pivoted aside, precisely as the fist swept past her, brushing the back of her shirt. He stumbled heavily beyond her, his feet thudding on the floor.

The hall filled with laughter and uncomplimentary noises. Raincloud was satisfied; his reflexes seemed no better than she had guessed, but he might not have tried too hard. She watched him return to face her, his features somewhat hardened now. Perhaps he might actually get mad; that would help.

Wiping his hand beneath his chin, the man suddenly hurtled toward her again, much faster than before. Again Raincloud evaded him, just in time, using a slightly different maneuver; it was unwise to try the same one twice, although those unfamiliar with rei-gi rarely caught on. But this time, her opponent knew enough to check himself and turn about sharply. To escape him, Raincloud had to leap backward, nearing the danger zone of the ring. The onlookers cheered.

The man took a step toward her, then another, keeping his weight low. Now at last he got the idea that Zheron had before, that he could maneuver her step by step toward the ring. This left Raincloud the dangerous alternative of letting him close enough to reach her again, perhaps even grab her arm. If he did, she would try “Falling Leaves.”

But as she deliberated, her opponent lost patience. His enormous arm slashed toward her left shoulder, as if to wipe her out once and for all.

Raincloud saw immediately that this time the man’s momentum would serve her well. Stepping forward with her right foot, she raised her left arm to meet his, crossing his wrist from the inside. With both hands she caught his leading arm, deflecting it downward in a circle. To complete the circle, she pivoted to the right, his own arm continuing to circle overhead. “Round the Mountain” he went.

As she completed her turn, a heavy crack echoed from the hall, and beneath her feet the floor vibrated, like an earthquake. Surprised, she dropped the man’s arm where he lay on his back, instead of immobilizing him as she generally would have done. Her mind flew instinctively to the exit; if this were an earthquake, how many seconds would she have, and how many children could she scoop up on her way out?

The Champion had taken a bad fall on his head. He drew himself up, slightly stunned. In the floor beneath him, jagged cracks radiated out from the spot where his skull had cracked the marble.

“The gods have spoken.” A voice called from the throne. The Imperator raised his arm. “The earth itself opens, and the gods of the earth call up to us. It’s a sign: Our contest is done, with honor for all. Let this event mark the reign of peace for our time, and for generations to come.”

All the warriors fell silent, like children when the Clanmother speaks. The Champion turned to Raincloud and bowed; she did likewise, careful to match his angle precisely. But her mind spun around the enigma of this Rhaghlan: the simian like her teacher; the liberal Imperator, proclaiming peace; and still, the murderer of his three brother princes.

Chapter 12

Raincloud enjoyed a brief reunion with her baby, while Iras formally “introduced” Verid to the Imperator, as well as Lem in lieu of his mate; the Elysian rituals were much modified for this occasion. Then came the banquet in the guests’ honor. Raincloud returned to translate for Verid and Lem, while Rhaghlan sat across from them. Zheron hovered intently at Rhaghlan’s side, like a coach, Raincloud thought. The young Imperator actually looked older than she had expected, at least as old as herself; but then, sims tended to age early.

“I believe we shall see a golden age for Urulan,” Rhaghlan was saying. “Already I have removed several impediments to freedom for sims. I have bestowed upon sims the right to own property, as well as the right to testify in court, except against their own masters.” Beside him Zheron and Dhesra nodded approvingly, their fair blue-eyed faces a sharp contrast to their simian leader.

Raincloud had figured out that only enslaved sims were referred to as such; the partial simian status of a free person was not acknowledged, at least in public. She began to wonder how many other Urulites might have a sim ancestor, back a generation or two. Now that she looked, she had noticed several sloping foreheads and pushed-in noses among the warriors. Rhaghlan himself must be at least an eighth gorilla, if not a quarter. As for his mother...

“Your people have made impressive strides,” Verid agreed, raising her goblet of wine. “You understand, of course, that full membership in the Fold requires full rights of citizenship for all the world’s inhabitants.”

A servant approached Rhaghlan from behind with a folded piece of paper. Rhaghlan took the note in his thick fingers and opened it. He read it, then sketched a brief reply. The servant took the reply and withdrew to disappear behind the curtain which separated the ladies. Raincloud watched with great curiosity. She could not help wondering to herself why the goddesses put up with such treatment, and how their men ever managed to rule themselves.

“And of course, full rights must extend to the females, as well,” Rhaghlan added. “That may take longer, as females lack the capacity for warrior’s honor, an essential basis for citizenship. Nevertheless, all things are possible.”

Raincloud translated, wondering whether the irony of it could be completely lost to them.

“Many things are possible,” Verid agreed. “Economic assistance may help in surprising ways. Of course, all trade with Fold worlds requires a treaty of peace, and renunciation of interstellar missiles.”

At her shoulder, a servant offered more roast lamb. Raincloud shook her head; the meat was delicious, but full of so much spice that her throat burned. She gulped some water in between translations.

“We, too, have conditions for trade,” Rhaghlan told her. “We have abolished all fetal experimentation and related evil practices which only lead to enslavement and cultural decadence. I have issued a family protection decree which holds that all infant life is sacred, from conception through birth and beyond. We expect all our trading partners to uphold this standard.”

“An excellent standard,” Verid assured him after Raincloud’s translation. “Of course we Elysians have always held all viable human life sacred.”

Raincloud started to translate, until she reached the word “viable”—which for Elysians meant, “immune to senescence.” There was no honest equivalent in Urulite. She stumbled and coughed, reaching again for her water glass. “All human life is sacred,” she muttered in conclusion, averting her eyes.

Shortly afterward the Imperator excused himself to attend to other affairs of state. Verid left as well for her guest quarters, pleading exhaustion from the trip. In fact, Raincloud knew she planned to make secret contact with the ship and its satellites for preliminary count of the missiles.

With their leader gone, the Urulites visibly relaxed. A musician appeared, hauling an instrument that consisted of five rows of bells of varying sizes. When struck, the bells sang a lovely melody, eerie yet beautiful.

Lem turned to Zheron. “Your Imperator made a magnificent gesture this afternoon. His courage and vision impressed us.”

Dhesra frowned and made a fist on the table. “I don’t like it,” he exclaimed. “The duel of death is sacred to the gods. Too many traditions are crumbling, too fast.”

“But he invoked the gods,” Zheron insisted. “Rhaghlan is the god, don’t you forget it. Besides,” he added shrewdly, “we’d only look worse if our guest had won.”

“Why must all the females have warrior’s honor, too?” Dhesra added. “Whatever has that got to do with peace and trade, can you tell me that? It’s fine for barbarians, but our females are our own business. My own woman’s hard enough to manage already.”

Zheron laughed and pounded Dhesra’s arm. “You don’t beat her enough, that’s why.”

The servant brought another note from behind the curtain, which Zheron read. “The Imperial Queen Mother calls. She reminds me, it’s her turn for Raincloud.”

So it was time to switch genders again. “Might I see Iras, first?” Raincloud asked. She really wanted the baby; her breasts were getting full.

“As you wish.”

Dhesra rose from the table and motioned her to follow. He led her to a different curtain, before a side room.

The curtain parted, and a female servant appeared in a black hooded robe. A plain white mask which she held up by a long wooden handle covered her face. She led Raincloud through the curtain, leaving Dhesra outside in the men’s section.

Iras sat on a reclining couch off to the right, unmistakable in her talar of butterflies. She was surrounded by ladies in robes of brightly colored velvet with jewels ornamenting their hoods and masks. In the absence of men, the ladies relaxed and let down their masks now and then; they seemed to do double duty as fans.

To Raincloud’s relief, she caught sight of Blueskywind being passed around. The baby seemed to enjoy the attention well enough; but as soon as she saw her mother, she let out a wail and made sucking motions with her mouth.

The masked faces all turned toward Raincloud.

“There’s the mother, all right,” observed one. “Hurry up, feed her!”

“She’s had food earlier,” Iras assured Raincloud. “She loves pureed pickles.”

“Yes, but that’s not enough. Go on,” the Urulite insisted.

Raincloud said hesitantly, “If you’re sure it’s all right...”

Blueskywind wailed again and struggled in the lady’s arms. Raincloud took her and sat down, opening her breast flap just enough for the baby to reach. The baby nursed immediately, relaxing in Raincloud’s arms.

One of the Urulite ladies sighed in amazement. “She really is a female, after all.”

“Maybe that’s what the Champion really needed this afternoon.”

Shrieks of laughter followed, and the masks tilted in every direction as the ladies shared their amusement. Then the laughter died, and the ladies rose to their feet.

A newcomer approached the group. She wore a robe of crimson, and a gold tiara pinned her hood down upon her head.

Iras arose, with her Elysian instinct for introductions. “Her Imperial Highness the Queen Mother Bhera,” she announced. “May I introduce, uh, Raincloud Windclan,” she added, prudently avoiding any gendered titles.

“So I hear.” Queen Mother Bhera spoke in a slurred tone, as if she had a speech impediment. A common problem for sims; even Rhun had had had a touch of it. She lifted a white-gloved hand.

Without a word the rest of the ladies got up and seemed to glide out of the room, their shoes barely visible beneath their robes. Raincloud eyed them incredulously. She had never seen such a subservient group of goddesses in all her life.

A servant came forward to help the Queen Mother into a chair. She must be in pain, Raincloud realized; her back was hunched, and she moved stiffly.

Iras touched Raincloud’s sleeve. “If you can manage, I’ll retire now.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” the Queen Mother commanded Raincloud as she nursed. “Take your time.” The servant poured her a cup of hot liquid, which she handled awkwardly in her gloved hands.

Meanwhile Blueskywind was finishing her feeding; it only took a minute or two, now that her diet had diversified. She smiled broadly at her mother’s face and reached up to play with her braids.

The Queen Mother leaned over curiously to inspect the child. Blueskywind returned the stare, momentarily transfixed by the sight of the jeweled mask. Then she put her tongue to her palate and produced a loud “Pop!”

At that the Queen Mother sat up sharply, as if startled. “Extraordinary!” she exclaimed. “A most extraordinary child.”

“Thank you, Queen Mother,” said Raincloud.

“Bhera, please.” Bhera sipped from her cup. Long seconds passed; from outside the curtain came deep shouts of laughter, mingling with the tones of the musical bells. “Now my dear, I’d like you to tell me all you’ve discussed with my son. I want to make sure he didn’t miss any important point.”

This put Raincloud in an awkward position. At no time had Zheron or anyone else said a word about the Queen Mother’s role in negotiations. “The Imperator was thoroughly attentive, I’m certain.”

“Yes, but you and I know that men have little ways of ‘forgetfulness’ about certain kinds of important points—especially those regarding women. Did he ask you what we need to do to liberate our women? Well, did he?”

“The subject arose,” Raincloud said carefully. “We discussed the need for a democratic constitution.”

“A democracy!” Bhera exclaimed. “For those—that gaggle of geese?” she added, pointing in the direction the ladies had departed. “They wouldn’t know what to do with a democracy if you put one in their laps. Yes, democracy, eventually; but how to get there in one piece?” She tilted her head to one side. “You come from a free world, a frontier world not unlike our own. You are a free female. What do you think? What would be the most important first step we could take toward freedom?”

Just about any step would be an improvement, Raincloud thought. “Get rid of your masks,” she proposed. “That would be a big step forward.”

“Do you think so?” For a moment Bhera considered. Then she let her own mask fall to one side.

The face was that of the old “grandmother” Raincloud had seen in Tulle’s preserve. Of course, there was a human look in her, too, in the eyes, and the nose projected forward a bit. But she had at least as much Homo gorilla in her as Homo sapiens.

“I thought as much,” Bhera said, astutely reading Raincloud’s response. “You see, in our present condition, there are distinct advantages to the mask. A strong spirit may bear herself such that others forget her looks. Don’t think I’m the only one, either. Many a sim daughter escapes bondage behind the mask. My departed lord had curious taste in women—and the mask helped him indulge that taste.” She replaced the mask. “Ah well, it’s a puzzle. As the Fool used to say, we all must find our own liberation; no one can do it for us.” Then she pointed an accusing finger. “Besides, you Elysians aren’t quite so liberated yourselves. You experiment on unborn gorillas—and even sims! Isn’t it so?”

A sticky point, all right. “I’m not prepared to discuss that. You’ll have to ask the Subguardian—”

“Not prepared, indeed.” Bhera’s voice was thick with disgust.

“You must remember, Lady Bhera, that Elysians bear no children of their own. They depend on artificial reproduction, and the technology requires research for maintenance.”

“Elysians bear no children of their own,” she repeated, stressing every syllable. “Nor nurse them, I suppose.” She leaned her face closer, as if to get a better look at Raincloud. “You’re not just the only man among them—you’re their only woman, as well.”

While Raincloud digested this pronouncement, Bhera sat back again and seemed to remember something. “Of course, you’re not Elysian. Why are you here?”

For a moment Raincloud hesitated, tempted to tell her own reason. “It’s my job,” she answered safely. “I’m an interpreter.”

“Clearly,” Bhera replied. “But why yourself? Why a Bronze Skyan, not an Elysian, on such a delicate mission?”

“Knowledge of Urulan is rather scarce in the Fold,” Raincloud pointed out, “since your world’s been closed off. I had rare qualifications; I’m one of a handful of people in the Fold to have studied with an Urulite native.”

“Really. How did you manage that?”

She hesitated. What could it matter, years after his death? “He taught at Founders University. He was an émigré.” Actually, she realized, Bhera might appreciate the truth. “He was an escaped slave; a sim.”

Bhera shuddered and drew closer. “Who was he?” she demanded, her voice suddenly intense. “What was his name?”

“He had no clan; he was called simply Rhun.”

“Rhun! Not Rhun the Fool! It can’t be so.”

“Why yes, so he called himself,” said Raincloud wonderingly. “You knew him?”

“He taught my son.” Her son, the future Imperator. “Rhun was the Imperial Pedagogue; he supervised the teaching of all the Palace children. He took a special liking to Rhaghlan, and gave him extra lessons. He put in a good word for him with the Imperial father, who gave the boy extra guards and retainers. In the long run, I believe it saved his life.”

Raincloud’s head was spinning to take this all in. Old Rhun had tutored the Imperial children; and he never breathed a word, all those years.

“He called himself ‘Fool’ for safety, I believe, to let the lords think he was a harmless old scholar. But he knew what he was about. He escaped when Rhaghlan was twelve.” Bhera slowly shook her head. “All those years we never knew what became of him... But you. You say you studied with him.”

“I studied language and philosophy.”

“Where is he now?”

“He died of heart failure, three years ago.” Actually four, now. It still seemed like yesterday, the morning she had walked into his office and found him there, slumped over his desk. Beneath him lay The Web, open to the middle of Part Three. Raincloud was convinced he had done that on purpose, when the pains came on and he knew his time was near.

Bhera was silent for some minutes. “A great loss. But you studied with him, too,” she added reflectively. She glanced at the child, now asleep breathing noisily in Raincloud’s arms. “A pity you’re spoken for. You would have made a good second queen.”

The black-haired simian form of Imperator Rhaghlan came to mind, intelligent and virile. She thought, he would have made a good second consort.

When Raincloud at last arrived at the guest house, Verid and Lem were engaged in heated debate, under electronic protection. She hoped Urulite listening technique was as primitive as Verid supposed. “It can’t be,” Lem was saying. “They must be cloaked somehow. There can’t be no missiles at all.”

“I tell you, that’s it,” Verid insisted. “You can’t hide the gravity anomalies around white hole generators—there’s just no way.”

“No way that you know of,” Lem insisted. “The Valans might have the know-how. Maybe they sold it to the Urulites, back when they were friends.”

“Three centuries back? Be serious.”

Raincloud put in, “What about the radionuclear traces we detected?”

Lem gave her an impatient look. “Of course, Urulan does have short-range nuclear warheads. Those do plenty of damage locally. But if they haven’t got missiles able to jump the Fold—why they’re no strategic threat at all.”

“That’s just my point,” Verid emphasized. “Intentionally or not, the Valans have overstated their intelligence data.”

“And we believed it. What fools we’ve been.”

There was a short silence.

“It sounds like good news to me,” suggested Raincloud.

“The sim stuff is bad news,” said Lem. “If these Urulites really all turn out to be part sim—by Helix, how could this be?”

“It makes sense, when you think of it,” Verid explained. “You start out with a slave, a half-breed perhaps. The most valuable slave offspring on the market would be those with more human character, probably sired by their master. After a couple of generations, they might pass for human—especially if they’re female, behind a mask all the time. The clever ones buy their freedom, or else they run off, and there you are.”

Lem shook his head. “We can’t possibly let them donate germ cells. Sim genes in our shons—what a scandal.”

Raincloud winced. “You’d better watch yourself.”

“She’s right,” said Verid coldly. “We all had better watch what we say—very carefully.”

Chapter 13

The sun rose the next morning, a deep yellow sun. A broad sweep of cloud hovered below the Imperial City, while in the distance the tips of other needle rocks poked above the cloud like islands. One could see for many kilometers, the sky as clear as Shora’s, something Raincloud never quite got used to.

By midmorning Lord Dhesra had summoned them to the Palace for the real negotiations to start. They met in a conference room illuminated by two enormous chandeliers, in which a number of dead light fixtures had not been replaced. Raincloud wondered how Verid would manage without a holostage recessed in the table. The finely crafted wood showed years’ worth of dents and scratches. In the back corner, a section of the room was separated by a screen depicting scenes of the god Azhragh planting the people-seeds.

“This is our position,” began Rhaghlan. “We Urulites believe that our world was created at the center of the universe; that our Imperium was founded for the purpose of spreading the will of the gods throughout the inhabited worlds. On that basis, we are considering the request of your people to visit our realm and receive enlightenment.”

The Imperator spoke rapidly, in a harsh tone. Raincloud had to concentrate on her translating, but even so she could tell that his approach would offer Verid little comfort. Valedon had to give up all claim to several disputed jump stations, and Elysium had to forsake their alleged plan to terraform Urulan; the Fold must sign a universal agreement to ban all forms of genetic engineering; and a huge package of development aid must be granted right away, to enable Urulan to raise its living standard to a level comparable with the richer worlds of the Fold. He went on in this vein for more than two hours, interrupted only by occasional notes passed from behind the decorated screen.

By the time he concluded, the noonday sun was well overhead, bringing welcome warmth into the room. Raincloud was getting hoarse despite frequent sips of water. After all, the two leaders got to rest their voices in turn, but there was no respite for the interpreter.

Verid then launched into a rebuttal of the Imperator’s view. Somewhat to Raincloud’s surprise, she did not try to ease into the disagreements with the subtlety that generally characterized her Sharer conferences, but simply struck back directly, point by point. It was Urulan after all who had initiated contact, and whose society most needed help from outside. Valan border disputes must be negotiated directly, or with assistance from the Fold council. Any notions about terraforming a human-inhabited world were specious, forbidden by the Free Fold. Genetic engineering was a fact of modern life, the very standard of living to which Urulan aspired. In fact, Elysium would insist upon donation of germ cells for its gene bank. Finally, development aid would be contingent upon Urulite disarmament and initiation of democratic reform.

At that point, Verid started in on the Elysian list of demands: make reparations for the two Valan freighters, and other vessels pirated over the last century; cease genocidal repression of rebel provinces; return all prisoners and hostages; and allow the Free Fold Humane Commission to investigate charges of slavery, bestial cross-breeding, and abuse of women. It was basically Flors’s old line, reasonable enough in its own right, but well outside Urulan’s worldview. With such a tack from both sides, and only one more full day left, Raincloud could scarcely see how they would get anywhere.

Rhaghlan must have agreed, for he used the occasion of one of his notes from behind the screen to interrupt Verid’s line. “The roast lamb is getting cold,” he pointed out. “We’ll offend the Spirit of Mirhiah if we delay our dinner any longer.”

The sumptuous midafternoon meal was extremely welcome, although it left Raincloud feeling sleepy. She missed a phrase or two from Rhaghlan, which he corrected in perfect Elysian. Either the good dinner, or the chance to show off his education, seemed to put the Imperator in a better mood. “We must have your Prime Guardian to visit us soon,” he announced suddenly, as if it were a new idea. “Don’t you agree, Zheron?”

“An excellent plan, my lord,” Zheron replied. “Let’s issue a formal invitation right away. And let’s open diplomatic relations between our two worlds.”

These of course were the two main objectives of their mission. It occurred to Raincloud that the morning’s exchange was simply the verbal equivalent of her duel the previous day. Perhaps the Elysians could play this game after all.

“Let me explain something,” Rhaghlan added as they returned to the conference table. “The age of provincial warfare on Urulan is past. Of course, my Imperial father in his great wisdom had to take certain actions which caused pain among the people. What else could he do but apply the ultimate weapon to those inhuman creatures who plundered the cities and violated the women? But now the gods have made possible new ways. We have helped the provinces grow together.”

This statement was all the more remarkable, given that the Imperium had never officially admitted its use of nuclear warheads.

“Your approach is encouraging,” Verid admitted. “I hope it applies to more distant neighbors as well. Incidentally, where are all the long-range missiles you permitted us to count?”

At that Rhaghlan shrugged elaborately. “What you have counted, we have,” Rhaghlan replied. “Isn’t that so, Grand Vizier?”

Zheron nodded. “When the Valans first accused us,” he told Verid, “I assured your previous Subguardian that we had no such capability. He refused to believe me. So then I thought, maybe it’s better to have missiles. Maybe then other worlds will take us more seriously.”

It was good news, all right, but the Elysians were not smiling. Who would look worse fools, after all, the Valans or they?

“On the whole,” Zheron added philosophically, “imaginary missiles may be preferable to real ones. Their maintenance costs less, and less honor is lost to give them up.”

Raincloud returned to the guest house to find her baby fussing interminably. The diapers had run out and an octopod was sent back to the ship for more. But Iras took everything in stride. “You know, Zheron’s staff arranged for some prominent merchants to meet me,” she said. “I see remarkable opportunities. Those valleys are full of untapped resources, especially minerals.”

“Loans already? You know what happens to government loans,” Raincloud warned her.

“Oh, no; I’m talking small business loans. Start with the entrepreneurs, you know.”

The next morning, Zheron came to the guesthouse to draft a joint announcement of the Elysian visit, an invitation to their Prime, and a plan to resume relations. This session was all business, fine points of wording in two languages. Raincloud was completely in her element; she might almost have forgotten she was on Urulan instead of back in Founders City, drafting trade agreements.

Afterward Zheron was in high spirits, almost light-headed with elation. It was a great moment for him, Raincloud knew; after two centuries of isolation, to preside over the reopening of his world. He clapped Verid on the arm so hard she nearly fell over. “Now we’ll entertain you right!” he announced. “This afternoon, we tour the city. I will show you our most renowned antiquities.”

Raincloud could hardly resist this invitation to see the monuments she knew only from books, even though it was Blueskywind’s nap time. So she bundled up the child in her leather pouch, well fed and dry; she might last a couple of hours, with luck.

Verid and Lem had a quick conference about security. The octopods would keep them safe enough in daylight, they thought. As the Elysians left their guesthouse, Zheron’s soldiers fanned ahead to avoid trouble; Dhesra brought up the rear. The streets were full of traffic, mostly market people on foot or on llamas. The men wore coarse shirts and breeches with coats of llama skin, while the women wore their ubiquitous hooded robes of black or brown, their white masks bobbing before their faces. The women hurried to bargain for figs or fresh chickens from stalls giving off rich odors of spices and tea. Children gaped at the foreign Elysians with their eight-limbed escorts; the adults seemed more wary of the soldiers.

Elsewhere, beggars leaned out of alleys, some of them with huge keloid scars that distorted their faces and arms. There were buildings boarded up and others burned-out, their charred rafters exposed and vacant. A sign posted hours of electricity for different sections of the city; fuel was rationed. Urulan had no orbital solar generators to microwave power down to the planet.

The roads were not laid out straight, but seemed to spiral down and outward from the top of the needle rock where the Palace stood gleaming like an ever present moon. A sudden turn brought them to the foot of a delicate blue bridge that arched like a taut bow across a chasm in the needle rock.

Zheron flung out his arm, pointing across the bridge. “Look there—the oldest temple of Azhragh.” There stood a spiral turret several stories high. Raincloud’s heart pounded at the sight of it, the heart of so many legends.

They started up the bridge slowly, the soldiers ahead and behind. In the chasm below, a mountain stream rushed between sheer walls of rock, thundering over little waterfalls.

Iras held tightly to the rail, but she leaned over curiously for a better look. “There’s a lot of power in that water,” she told Raincloud. “What these folks need is a good hydroelectric project.”

Raincloud gave her a look of disgust. “You know what happens to water projects.” L’li had squandered billions of credits through waste and corruption in projects like the dam of the River of Babies.

“The Temple of Azhragh,” Zheron was repeating. “There dwells the Great Lord who carved out the universe in a single day.”

Iras looked up from the rail and regarded the temple thoughtfully. The rushing of water covered her voice. “Raincloud,” she asked quietly, “why do they believe in gods and such things? Their ancestors got here in spaceships.”

Elysians could be surprisingly naive. “The settlement of Urulan is ten times older than Elysium,” Raincloud reminded her. “When the first settlers arrived here, light-years away from Torr, they could have lost spaceflight in a generation. That’s all it takes for science to enter the realm of legend.” This answer would satisfy Iras. The real answer was that every world had its gods, and all of them created the universe. But Raincloud would never try to explain that to an Elysian.

As the bridge reached the ground, they entered a courtyard surrounded by spiral turrets rimmed with gold. The walls were full of chipped stone and moldering ornaments, but their stature remained impressive. At one end of the courtyard stood a large fountain walled in by weathered blocks of stone, some of which had tumbled out of place. The fountain was carved into a giant snake which reared its head and bared its fangs. Water trickled below, marking a muddy trail.

“The inscriptions,” Raincloud remembered.

Iras looked over. “The what?”

“Inside the temple, it’s full of inscriptions. I want to see them.” She might never get another chance.

Zheron overheard her, and he needed little convincing to herd the group into the temple.

Inside, there was little heat, and the stone walls threw back their voices cheerlessly. But the colored inscriptions brought the walls to life. They depicted a vastly more complex version of the myth of Azhragh and Mirhiah than the one Raincloud had seen on the screen at Zheron’s legation the year before. Mirhiah, the goddess of earth and sky, was a giant figure whose breasts were mountains and whose breath was the south wind. The figure of Azhragh was smaller, almost childlike, for all that he stood upon her carving the planet out of her belly.

“What’s it about?” asked Iras wonderingly.

“It’s their creation myth, the early version,” Raincloud explained. “The goddess Mirhiah was a giant at first; but in later retellings, she dwindles down to nothing, while her child-consort Azhragh becomes a towering warrior.” Such a common pattern, in non-Clicker mythologies. A young people valued fertile women, whereas older, crowded societies needed warriors to kill off each other’s excess progeny. That was what Rhun had taught; Rhun the Fool.... A wave of sadness overcame her, and tears brimmed in her eyes.

“Does it tell it all, here?” asked Iras, pointing to the columns of script.

“Yes; let’s see, here it starts.” Tracing the wall with her hand, Raincloud translated the ancient script haltingly, oblivious to the rest of the party who were following Zheron’s rather standard tour-guide lecture. She and Iras were completely absorbed, when Dhesra cleared his throat, just by her shoulder. “Time to move on,” he muttered.

“Yes, just a minute.” Raincloud was determined to puzzle out this one part about the people-seeds, how their roots burrowed into the entrails of Mirhiah.

“Zheron says, ‘Move on,’” Dhesra insisted. “There are plenty of other monuments to look at.”

Reluctantly she tore herself away. The others were just disappearing outside, and she hurried to catch up. Fortunately Blueskywind remained fast asleep in her snug leather cocoon, bound securely below her mother’s chest; she slept all the better for Raincloud’s jostling.

As they emerged, the sun caught their eyes and they blinked, readjusting to the light. They seemed to have come out a different way than they had gone in, for they faced a narrow street that wound tortuously between walls of blackened stone.

The paving stones at her feet were large and rounded, and Raincloud’s feet slipped in between them. Dhesra and another man strode ahead briskly, their watchful eyes darting to the sides, their gaze lingering occasionally at the dark slit of a window above in the jagged wall.

It was then that her head turned to water, as if she had been stunned. She felt her knees buckle under, and she slipped to the street where the hard stones sent pain shooting up her arms. With her head lowered, she began to recover her wits.

Someone grabbed her arms from behind and jerked her up to stand, muttering something unintelligible in Urulite. She felt the sting of a blade jabbing up her lower back from the right, and her assailant’s left arm locked across her neck, his elbow brushing above her baby’s head.

“Goddess,” she whispered hoarsely. With a bend at the knees, her left foot stepped forward. Simultaneously her left arm reached behind her back, caught the knife-wielding hand and continued its thrust—into thin air, as her body was no longer there.

The attacker’s left arm fell away from her neck. Raincloud swung his knife hand wide to her right, hoping to throw him, but he slipped away. Her back stung with pain; the knife must have done some damage.

As she rose, another man came running at her, his knife thrusting down to her face. Prepared this time, she raised her left arm to meet him, shunting his stroke to the left at the precise moment for her to grasp his wrist in her right hand. He pulled the knife back; she obliged him by stepping forward into his side, pushing on his elbow and twisting the knife hand down. At the moment she sensed his balance was lost, she swung him down, releasing him in the direction of his companion. The man cried out as he took a hard fall on the stones, while his companion cursed as he stumbled over him.

From behind Raincloud heard the steps of a third man running toward her. But now her back was throbbing, as blood trickled beneath her trousers, and it was all she could do to stand; she doubted she could manage another throw.

Rousing her last strength, she took a few steps forward as if to outrun him, encouraging him to build momentum. Then with a sharp turn to the right, she sank to her knees and fell on her side in a hunched position, her head bent in till her chin touched the baby.

The man’s foot caught her side, grinding her painfully into the cobblestones, but his upper body rushed onward above her back. There was a thump on the stones and a loud curse.

The deserted street came alive, as onlookers rushed to see. Two market women helped her up with keening cries, exclaiming over the blood, and the baby, who had woken at last and began to wail.

“Raincloud?” Iras bent to reach her. They caught each other’s arms and held close.

“You’re all right?”

“I think so,” said Iras. “I gave one the ‘Tumbling Rock’ and threw off another one; it happened so fast. We need a servo medic...”

Zheron’s soldiers were finally hurrying back in force. Two octopods lay sprawled across the cobblestones.

Then at last Raincloud caught sight of Lord Dhesra, lying in the street. His arm lay back, limp and white, his eyes staring, a pool of blood seeping beneath his head. Rhun had looked like that, the day she found him, his eyes fixed and forever empty....

For a moment she blacked out. She found herself on her side while one of the women bound her wound with strips of cloth. Somehow she managed to extract Blueskywind from the pouch and put her to her breast. She nursed her there in the street, her gaze fixed on the dead man, a man who only moments before had been vibrant, alert, a member of the living. Now, as Sharers would say, he had sunk to the ocean floor. And, but for the Dark One’s help, Raincloud might have followed.

Chapter 14

In the laboratory one of Blackbear’s mutant embryos was completing its third month. All the others had already developed defects and been terminated. But this one still looked normal. He could observe it by low-intensity light scanning, which generated a monochrome holographic image upon the console.

The embryo, which he would now consider a fetus, had arms and legs and fully distinct digits; its hands extended as if to play a musical instrument. Its eyes faced forward, and its nose was turned up, fully human. In fact, there was little other than human about it that Blackbear could see. Its percentage of chimp and gorilla genetic material, he suspected, was less than half. But it would never reach term.

As a doctor, Blackbear had seen his share of dead fetuses. He performed terminations routinely at the request of the goddess; it was considered a sign of self-indulgence to bear children less than three years apart. He always felt a certain philosophic sadness about it, although with so many children around it was hard to feel sad for long. He had felt secretly glad when Lynxtail gave her child over to Falcon Soaring; only a year and a half since her previous one, Lynxtail might otherwise not have carried it to term.

But this was the first time he had actually watched an embryo grow before his eyes from a cell under a microscope into a miniature human a couple of centimeters long, expanded to baby size on the holostage. And for all its perfection, this one had no future. A “monstrosity,” Pirin would call it. Yet if it were so monstrous, why did they use it to test their longevity genes?

Around the doorway came Sunflower, leaning in a moping sort of way, his thumb in his mouth.

“Hi, Sunny. What’s the toybox doing?”

“No toybox,” Sunflower answered, his voice muffled by his thumb. “I hate the toybox.”

Blackbear sighed. “What’s the matter?”

“When is Mother coming home?”

He wished he could say for sure. Raincloud’s three-day mission would take nearly three weeks local time, and only the first week had gone by. Citizens grumbled that it was irresponsible of Hyen to let all his top Foreign Affairs people go off conferencing for so long. Blackbear missed Raincloud acutely, and wished he had shown less annoyance before she left. He hoped the baby was getting enough milk and attention and was not left to cry just because those foolish Elysians were too busy negotiating. “Mother is coming home in another two weeks, Sunny,” he told him for the fifth or sixth time.

The child seemed to consider this. Then, as his first question had not received a satisfactory response, he modified it and tried again. “When is Mother coming home today?”

Blackbear sighed again. “Image out, please,” he called to the console. The fetal image winked out. “Let’s find your sister and go off to the butterfly garden.” It was an hour earlier than they usually met Kal, but he could let the children run. His experiment had reached a point where it could use a bit of stirring around in the subconscious.

“Hawktalon’s gone visiting with Doggie,” Sunflower told him.

“Very well, she’ll find us in the garden.”

So they set off, Sunflower tiptoeing this way and that to collect tumbleweeds from the street. The tumbleweeds had lessened somewhat, since a herbicide had been applied. But with Verid out of town, Sharer negotiations made little progress.

The anaean garden always had an otherworldly feel to it, with all the little green leaves that magically fluttered off as leafwings. Light filtered cheerily through the trees, and the mooncurved benches gleamed like mother of pearl. There were few visitors, mainly Anaeans, for other Elysians tended to prefer brighter colors.

They came upon Kal after all, amidst a group of students whose short trains marked their youth. It must be his class, Blackbear guessed. He stopped so as not to interfere, but Sunflower ran ahead. “There he is, Daddy,” Sunflower called. “The teddy bear man is here.”

Blackbear hurried to catch up and quiet the child. But Kal beckoned with his arm. “Come join us,” he said. “We’re just finishing up anyway.”

He sat on a mooncurve next to a young man with fine-boned features who grinned appreciatively at Sunflower. This one wore yellow anaeans on his train, instead of the brilliant blue heliconians. Still embarrassed, Blackbear tried to look away from the other students. He had not met their mates, after all. Sunflower was poking the ground with a stick, where something had caught his interest.

Kal explained, “We have just been considering the nature of the greatest good. Over the last decade we’ve shared a number of texts by authors who touch on this point, most recently a commentator on the third century period essays about The Web. You were saying, Ilian?”

Blackbear tried to imagine a university course lasting as long as a decade; the medical students could barely stand a semester. Meanwhile Ilian, a young Heliconian goddess, resumed her answer. “This commentator says that our souls are like birds which can find ‘the good’ only as birds fly, that is, by instinct. But what if different souls have different instincts? Some may seek strength, others joy, others mastery.” Ilian had a full head of black hair, which Blackbear would have loved to braid. He missed Raincloud so badly.

The young Anaean next to Blackbear smiled. “We spent a year on mastery, as I recall. We concluded that all souls seek to be mastered by the good.”

“Some of us concluded that,” corrected Ilian, brushing her hair back over her shoulder. “I think it’s self-evident that different souls seek different things.”

Kal asked, “Is the greatest good always that which we seek?”

A short silence followed. “In the end, yes,” said the young Anaean. “Like a compass needle, it always comes to rest the same; but it may spin around a good deal first.”

“I don’t think so,” Ilian objected. “If different souls seek different things, yet only one thing is good, then logically, we don’t always seek what is good.”

A second woman spoke up. “The commentator follows The Web in saying that love is the greatest good. But love has many aspects, some of which are evil.”

“Yes,” said Kal, “for at times love seems but a cruel diversion from the main business of the universe, which is hatred.”

“No,” said the young Anaean, “love is the main business of the universe. Love is like the air itself, the place where all butterflies belong. And yet, so few of us have sprouted wings....”

“All butterflies have wings,” objected Ilian. “The problem is, not all that emerge learn to fly. Most of them get eaten up first. That’s our trouble: so many of us get eaten up by love before we grasp its power.”

The second woman said, “Perhaps love is a new invention yet, only about a million years old. It requires evolution.”

Nonsense, thought Blackbear. Even dogs knew enough to long for their masters. But he knew better than to speak.

Kal said, “Perhaps it would help to define the aspects of love, and distinguish which are good or evil. There is love of one’s family; and love of the Web. There is love between man and woman—”

Another student exclaimed lightly, “There’s the greatest good; ‘to be a man.’”

The others laughed as if this were an old joke.

“Of course,” said Kal, “we are no longer men nor women, only servos of flesh and blood. The question is, What does it mean to be a servo? Whom do we serve?”

A waiter approached the group and came to Blackbear. “Your house just took a call from Bronze Sky,” it said. “The transfer failed to take, but your caller will try again in half an hour.”

Blackbear’s heart pounded as he got up. He hoped it was good news; he tried to remember who else was expecting a baby. “Come on, Sunny,” he called. Then he made for the nearest holostage to summon Hawktalon, who appeared as usual with Doggie and their waiter friend Chocolate. Whatever did they spend so much time on, he wondered, although he guessed the waiter’s name gave a clue.

Hawktalon got home before he did. “Nobody’s called yet, Daddy.”

“Your caller said half an hour,” the house reminded him. “So sorry the transfer failed; please report my defect. But you know how these interstellar calls are. Why the other day a house down the street took a call from Solaria—”

“Yes, yes,” said Blackbear impatiently. This house was getting more chatty than ever. In fact, it was more than two hours before the call came through; two hours of restless waiting, while the children scrapped at each other and tossed their toys around the room.

At last the light filled the holostage, and Nightstorm appeared, her eldest daughter beside her. They both wore plain white trousers, the color of mourning. Someone in the clan must have died.

“Hello, Blackbear,” said Nightstorm quietly. “I have sad news. You’d better have Raincloud here,” she added.

“Well,” said Blackbear awkwardly, “she’s not available just now. I’ll let her know.”

Nightstorm frowned. “Then you’d better fetch your firstborn.”

The two children were still carrying on back in the bedrooms. Puzzled, Blackbear called Hawktalon to come out to the holostage. They stood together, arm in arm.

“Last night, Crater Lake turned over.”

Crater Lake had long been known to harbor deep pockets of saturated carbon dioxide, from a combination of volcanic seepage and spring water. These pockets, trapped beneath the cold deep waters, could be released if the warmer upper layers “turned over” with the cooling of autumn. When the gas came up, its density would cause it to flow down the mountain, asphyxiating any creature that breathed. Blackbear’s home village lay just downhill of Crater Lake.

“Didn’t they keep it monitored?” he said unsteadily.

“Yes, but their minds were on the forest fires,” Nightstorm told him. “Someone did sound an alarm, but those who awoke of course ran toward the lake.” She paused, then added, “Your brother Three Deer survived.” Three Deer, like Blackbear, had married out of the village.

He felt unsteady; the room seemed to be turning around. He heard Hawktalon say, “I think you need to sit down, Daddy.”

Chapter 15

Somehow Blackbear managed to get himself and his children out of the house and onto a jumpship for Bronze Sky. Their savings did not quite cover the tickets, but Nightstorm promised to send the rest. He had to get home for the funeral of his mother and father, his six brothers and sisters, their goddesses and consorts and children, and more aunts and uncles than he was prepared to count. Over two thousand people had died, nearly all the inhabitants of Crater Town, most of them related to him one way or another.

The express Fold connections on this well-traveled route cut the trip down to two days local time. He watched the globe of their home world grow out of the void, like a suspended dandelion, its stratosphere tinted permanently by volcanic dust. The dust suspension, plus the planet’s distance from its sun, compensated for the high atmospheric content of carbon dioxide, which otherwise would have trapped enough heat to boil off all life.

The magnetic tunnel train from Founders City pulled into Caldera Station at midmorning. As the car slowed to a halt, Blackbear still sat in his seat, staring ahead.

“It’s our stop, Daddy,” Hawktalon reminded him. “Don’t forget the luggage.” Hawktalon had become very grown up all of a sudden. She and Sunflower took the travels in stride, from jumpship to shuttle to continental transit, swinging Fruitbat and Wolfcub beside them.

He shook himself and got up from the seat, accepting the luggage which Hawktalon hoisted down. They stepped out of the mirror-smooth car and took the elevator up to ground level.

The horizon all around was rimmed with murky red, seeping into bronze yellow overhead. The scent of burning pine welcomed him more than anything else could; indeed, on the distant mountainside a patch of black smoke confirmed that the Dark One was not done with summer yet.

“Blackbear!” Nightstorm jumped down from her horse and gave him a big hug. “Three Deer is at the longhouse, and—oh Goddess, I just can’t believe what happened....” There were hugs all round as Hawktalon and Sunflower greeted their beloved aunt, and Blackbear swung her daughter up to his shoulders.

“I can ‘walk through’ you,” Sunflower insisted, for the insubstantial quality of holo images fascinated him. “See?” He tried, but the best he could manage was to burrow through between his aunt’s legs.

“You’ll stay with us,” Nightstorm assured him. “Then afterward, Aunt Ashcloud insisted she wants the children for a few days.”

Blackbear managed a smile, for he knew she meant to help him. He was now a Windclan, after all. But the family he was born into—he could not begin to comprehend what had happened to them.

“Falcon Soaring wants you to look at her baby,” Nightstorm added. “Of course the new doctor is fine, but she really wants you to see her. And you know how it is this time of year; my daughter was up all night with asthma again, and Lynxtail’s boy just won’t stop coughing.”

“I’ll take a look at them,” he said automatically. Mother and father... sisters and brothers....

They all mounted the horses Nightstorm had brought round, Sunflower sitting up behind his father. Hawktalon flipped the reins as if she had never left, but Blackbear felt a bit stiff, not having ridden for over a year. “Y-yap!” yelled Nightstorm’s daughter on her shaggy pony. Needing no more encouragement, Hawktalon galloped after.

The horses soon slowed, stepping with care up the winding path with its treacherous stones. Terraced fields of beans traversed the mountainside. A familiar whiff of sulfur reached his nostrils; soon, they came upon the plateau of hot springs, where huge cratered pools of mud were dotted by geyser-powered generators. The horses skirted the plateau, of course; no need to get their hooves cooked.

The noonday sun had baked the sky a lemon color when Blackbear’s familiar neighborhood landmarks started to appear: an old spruce, gnarled and bent by the wind; around the bend, a pile of rocks that the children used to play on. Then abruptly, the landscape changed. The ground was charred black, brightened by an occasional patch of fireweed whose seeds took root quickly in sterile soil. Where there had been forest, the trees were leveled, or stood only as dark skeletons. Blackbear’s hair stood on end as he remembered that their old longhouse no longer existed. He had forgotten to warn the children.

He whistled after Hawktalon to call her back, but she galloped ahead. At last he caught up to her, sitting on her horse and contemplating the ruins.

A little chin nudged his back. “Dad?” Sunflower asked in a small voice. “Is that my house?”

Blackbear swung himself down from the horse, then gathered Sunflower in his arms. “We have a new house,” he promised, his voice unsteady. “We’re just saying good-bye to this place, okay?” They ought to have gone by another road, he told himself, although he knew well enough there was no other.

Hawktalon nodded sagely. “We’re just saying good-bye.”

Nightstorm trotted her horse over to his side, her daughter smiling cheerily behind her. “You’ll be pleased to see the new longhouse,” she promised. “We rebuilt on the north end of our land. For some reason the northeast corner didn’t burn; you know how the Goddess always leaves one place untouched.”

But not Crater Lake, he thought silently.

The new wooden longhouse of the Windclan was a welcome sight, although white drapes of mourning for the dead hung from the windows. A tumult of people spilled out of the house: Fieldmouse, Raincloud’s brother in his white turban, with a toddler swung under one arm; Lynxtail, with another one on her shoulders; Clanmother Windrising, her gray braids redone in pearl beads; the older children clamoring, with younger ones on their backs or dolls over their shoulders. It was good to hear so many voices “clicking” again.

As Blackbear greeted them a torrent of conflicting emotions surged through him. He loved them all, almost madly, his people, all the children whose navels he had tied and whose earaches he had cleared. And yet he was angry too—why had these survived, and not his own sisters and brothers? Then guilt overwhelmed him, for half wishing them dead, if only his own...

“Blackbear!” It was his brother Three Deer. They fell into each other’s arms, sobbing. At least he could let out something at last. “They were all just—asleep in their beds,” Three Deer began haltingly. “A few tried to escape, but the gas caught them by the throat. Most of them were just there, dead where they lay, without a mark on them...” He started to sob again for a while. His goddess from the Full Moon Clan folded her arms around him, and his little boy put his head in his father’s lap, sucking his thumb like Sunflower. As he calmed down, he began to speak again. “I still can’t believe it,” he said, stroking the head of his child. “I can understand the fire, with its dark hunger. But this silent death, like a thief in the night—I can’t make any sense of it.”

Blackbear said nothing, but he agreed. He could not understand it, and nothing the High Priestess could say would make it any better.

From the kitchen, Fieldmouse called, “We’re serving up the goat stew. Send in the children—they’ll need to eat.”

The smell was inviting, and Hawktalon broke away to get her share. They would all need to eat well, to face the ordeal to come. But Blackbear could not face food.

He broke away, heading off to the sheep barn behind the longhouse. There was quiet. The earth was cool and fragrant, and the soft nasal bleating of the ewes calmed him. The sheep are lucky, he thought; they never have to know.... He frowned, as something stirred in his memory. Kal had said something like that once.

“Blackbear,” someone whispered. He startled a moment, thinking of his own sister who used to play tricks on him; a bat in his bedroom, a spider down his back.

But it was only Nightstorm, who had followed him out to the barn. “I thought you’d want to know... about the arrangements,” she whispered.

He roused himself. “All right,” he said thickly.

“The survivors want to try for a natural cremation,” she explained, “to honor the Dark One. The High Priestess agreed. So we’ve laid out the bodies in an area that the fire is projected to consume by morning. If the wind shifts, of course, we’ll take care of it.”

Blackbear nodded. It was a good plan; why start fire, when the Goddess made so much of Her own? Quail would have thought so.

Quail... the two boys... the two baby girls.

“Blackbear, we have to be going soon. The High Priestess is ready; and of course, the fire’s advancing.”

In a daze he followed her directions. There was a special carriage for him and the children, with Three Deer and his family. Sunflower sat in his lap, while Hawktalon kept patting his arm as if to comfort him.

After what seemed an interminable ride they came to a stop in the forest where the pines had been freshly cleared, their scent clinging to the air. Gusts of wind brought acrid whiffs of smoke; the fire was advancing all right. Across the valley hung the black smoke cloud of the Goddess in Her most fearsome aspect. Occasional bright flashes appeared as a dry tree exploded into flame, shooting fiery branches a hundred meters outward; the “hands of the Dark One,” uplifted in Her fearsome dance.

“It’s been a rich year for fire, don’t you think?” muttered Lynxtail to Fieldmouse several paces off, each rocking a child to sleep. They exchanged anxious looks, as if seeking encouragement from each other.

“Good for the soil,” Fieldmouse agreed, coughing heavily. “Our crops will flourish on all the ash.”

“What a feast the bears will have in the spring....”

Blackbear forced himself to turn his gaze to something more terrible than the distant fire. The bodies of the dead, over two thousand of them, were laid out upon the scaffolding of pine, as far as his eye could see. His eyes filled over, and for a moment he could not see. Then he blinked and wiped his eyes. Huddled with Three Deer and the children, he let Nightstorm lead them down the rows. The bodies were perfect, just as Three Deer had said; there must have been little need for the priestess assistants to touch them up. All the neighbors he had grown up with, they lay there in their best clothes, their hands neatly crossed, children ranged along with their parents, their favorite animals and dolls tucked under their arms. They might have been asleep, except for the horrible silent whiteness of every face.

Suddenly Three Deer squeezed Blackbear’s hand. Blackbear forced himself to take the next step, and look farther.

There was his mother. A glacial statue. His father beside her; the two looked oddly like their old faded wedding portrait, except that someone had painted the eyes closed. A sense of terror sparked inside him, and the portrait shook before his eyes, until someone caught his arm. He stayed there a long while.

Next to them was his eldest sister. She was long grown-up now, but he recalled her vividly as the adolescent who used to tease him whenever she got the chance. “Oh-oh... you’ve got a spider down your back!” His mind focused confusedly, first seeing his live elder sister as a young goddess, then the adult laid out before him.

Someone nudged him gently. He had a long way to go, after all.

His eyes rested on his sister’s consort next to her. He remembered their wedding well, the first wedding in his immediate family. Next to them, their daughters; the middle one had been a great friend of Hawktalon’s.

Hawktalon broke down, shaking, covering her head in his arm. “It’s too awful, Daddy,” she sobbed. “I don’t like being grown-up.” Sunflower began crying too.

Fieldmouse and another man hurried up to bundle the children away; it was enough for them. The clearing was filling with mourners now.

As he went on Blackbear found himself looking without seeing, as if his eyes could only hold so much. They must have passed his other sisters, his brothers; he could barely name them to himself. Time passed without ending, and yet it was as if time stood still. Then at last he reached the youngest.

Quail. Still a giant of a young man, he lay there almost as if it had to be a joke; he might get up at any moment and laugh at everyone. Blackbear actually felt a laugh welling up, strangled in his throat.

But Quail slept on, joining forever the original younger brother lost to the swollen river long ago. Together they floated away, along with Quail’s twin boys and his little twin girls with their look of mischievous queens. Each girl had a stuffed black teddy bear tucked into one hand. When Quail was barely older than the girls, Blackbear used to put him to bed at night with his own toy bear, which he himself had sewn together. “’Night, Ba-Ba,” the toddler would say, already a husky kid off-scale for his age.

From the west side of the clearing the bells began to toll, a carillon of deep tones that echoed across the valley. Then came the chanting of the priestess assistants. The sky had filled with the swirling gold and blood-red of Bronze Skyan sunset.

“It’s time,” Nightstorm whispered in his ear.

The mourners gathered to the west of the dead. Across the valley, the black clouds rolled ever closer.

“Hear me, people of the Caldera Hills!” The High Priestess called out from where she stood on top of a platform of freshly cut pines. Her braids, dyed orange, spiraled up into a forbidding headdress. Between her hands she held aloft a blacksnake two meters long, writhing in her grasp. “Hear me, and see the devastation wrought upon our sisters and brothers.” She paused, then gestured with the snake toward the fire in the west. “And see the devastation wrought upon our sister trees.” She paused again, her fearsome gaze searching the crowd. “And yet, remember that even the forest fire, even the Dark One in Her form of greatest fury, spares as much woodland as She consumes. And those who survive will flourish on the ashes.”

A squirrel scampered up a tree, its tail rippling behind like an Elysian train. Squirrels would survive the worst fires, and bears would thrive, and the fireweed would burst into color in the spring. But none of those was Blackbear’s sister or brother. “... spider down your back.”

“Can we humans say the same?” the High Priestess demanded. “When have we humans alone ever restrained our will to consume lives? Was our own birthworld not swallowed up by the instruments of our own hands? The Dark One spares Her creatures, and renews their life tenfold. We mourn our own loss; yet how often have we looked out on the world and failed to recognize our true sisters and brothers?”

The smoke from the advancing fire was becoming oppressive. They could not stay much longer; besides, the village downwind might need to be evacuated. “’Night, Ba-Ba.”

“We long for the Goddess to spare us; yet how often do we, in our willful blindness, set alight that which remains? Has this not happened, time and time again? Let this be our lesson: Never shall humans dare to choose those powers of destruction which belong to the Goddess alone. Leave death to the Dark One—humans, be humane.”

Chapter 16

After sending Raincloud back up to the ship for treatment, Verid collapsed in the Urulite guesthouse, her thoughts in turmoil. The morning had gone so well—and suddenly, this attack had turned everything upside down. How could Zheron have let such a thing happen?

“We ought to have known better, with these primitives,” said Lem.

“Those ‘primitives’, were sharp enough to burn our octopods,” Verid answered grimly. “It could have been a lot worse.”

“But our mission’s finished,” Lem said. “How can we possibly go through with it? You know what our citizens will say.”

She could imagine what Flors would have said. Elysians were paranoid about personal safety. “Let’s not be hasty,” she said. “You have to remember that none of the worlds we deal with are as safe as Elysium. The first thing is to find out exactly what happened, and how it affects our mission.”

After an interminable hour, Zheron at last returned. His look was grim and haggard. “I must speak to you alone,” he told Verid. Lem departed, and Verid obligingly turned on the voice isolation field.

“We have captured the attackers,” Zheron told her. “They intended to take two of your party as hostages, then use them to embarrass the Imperator and force us to break off talks.”

“So they... attacked us in the street.”

“Fortunately their stunners were not fully charged; a common occurrence, as our equipment is rarely functional,” Zheron admitted with startling frankness. “Nevertheless, we owe a great debt to Raincloud and the... Elysian female who so bravely fought them off, preventing their use as hostages.”

“But Lord Dhesra was not so fortunate.”

Zheron took in a breath and exhaled slowly. “Lord Dhesra is an incalculable loss to us.”

The attackers meant to kill Dhesra. It was a serious strike against Imperial rule. “These attackers—who are they?”

“They appear to be followers of a deceased prince.”

“One of those your Rhaghlan murdered,” Verid observed.

“Rhaghlan had no choice. He dispatched them in the midst of their plans to murder him.”

“Well, you all seem to be murderers one way or another,” she exclaimed in exasperation. “How can we possibly deal with you?”

“You’re murderers too.” Crossing his arms, Zheron faced her down. “You murder simian infants in your test tubes every day. What do you take us for? Sim blood is our blood; hardly one of us has not a sim for a great-grandparent, somewhere back. How shall I explain you to our people? How shall I then explain that your Free Fold expects us all to give up the art of warriors, the very thing that makes life worth living?”

For some minutes Verid was silent. Life was a cruel joke at times, she thought bitterly. We cannot all eat iron or sulfur. “I don’t envy you, Zheron.”

“Nor do I envy you.” He half smiled. “But I respect you a hell of a lot, Barbarian.”

Raincloud rested on the jumpship, grateful enough for Elysian comforts again. The gash on her back had turned out to be superficial, and the ship medic had patched it up without difficulty.

But the wound in her mind would take longer to heal. The sight of a man killed by a man, close enough to touch; it violated her senses. Men were supposed to be wholesome, nurturing creatures, not predators. Fighting and posturing were one thing, at worst an element of immaturity, but actual bloodletting was something else. To experience it herself came as a shock. It made her angry at the Urulites, and at herself and the Elysians for trusting them.

Iras stood nearby, bouncing Blueskywind, who had fed again on mashed pickles and peaches to supplement her milk, and was now in a very perky mood. She opened her mouth to crow, and Iras made a face back at her. “I’m so glad you came, Raincloud,” Iras said. “You’re an inspiration; I don’t know how I would have managed without you.”

Raincloud sighed and turned over on the couch. What would Rhun have said—“Diplomacy means dancing with vipers.” She asked Iras, “Are we going back soon?” She could not wait to see Blackbear again; she felt a pang of guilt for leaving Sunflower for three weeks.

“We’re running one more check through the ship, to make sure it’s repaired itself well enough to make it through the station.”

She had forgotten how the ship barely made it through the badly maintained Urulite jump station. Blackbear was right about this trip after all. Yet there was no way she could not have come.

“Raincloud?” Verid’s voice called through the intercom. “Are you in shape for a brief staff meeting before we head out?”

She assented, joining Verid and Lem in the conference room. Upon the table a holostage sprouted its usual field of letters; it appeared to be the statement Verid had composed with Zheron earlier that morning.

“There was one minor change in the wording I’d like you to check, in both languages,” Verid told her. “We also have some decisions to make. What exactly will we say about our mission, back at Elysium?”

“We’ll tell the truth,” said Raincloud without hesitation.

Lem frowned. “The citizens won’t like to hear about the violence. It won’t sit well with the Guardians, either,” he warned.

Raincloud looked beyond him with contempt.

“You’re both right,” Verid pointed out. “We can’t ignore the more embarrassing—and disquieting—aspect of our mission. But, considering Urulan’s record, we came out well. We all knew from the start how Rhaghlan got his throne. The real news, remember, is the interstellar missiles: their absence, that is. We must emphasize that, and put Valedon on the spot.”

“We’ll roast the Valans, all right,” Lem agreed. “We’ll call the question on their own missiles, too.”

As soon as Shora’s solar system was within radio range, Verid lost no time contacting the Nucleus. Hyen needed little convincing that their mission was a success; he had his speech written already.

“Greetings, my fellow citizens of the eternal Republic of Elysium, and fellow members of the Free Fold.” The image of the Prime Guardian filled the holostage on board. Never had the golden sash glowed so brightly, nearly washing out Hyen’s own face. This would be his greatest triumph ever, the crowning moment of his term as Prime. “I announce to you the beginning of a new era of peace for the Fold. Today, my official envoys return from a state visit to Urulan, a world that has chosen to open its doors to us after more than two centuries of isolation....” The joint statement from Verid and Zheron soon followed.

In the ship’s viewscreen a twinkling blue dot appeared, then widened into the pale disk of Shora.

There could be no more welcome sight, except of course to see her own Bronze Sky await her return. Raincloud had forgotten how much she missed the wide open hills and plains of her own home. She asked the ship to call Blackbear.

To her surprise, there was no response, even from the house.

“So sorry,” the ship said. “Your house must be experiencing technical difficulties. I’ll report the defect.”

“Uh, no need to do that.” Doggie and the house must be up to their tricks again. But the last thing she needed was to have Public Safety come in and cleanse the house network, after months of getting it trained to their family needs. She fumed inwardly; that house would need a good talking to.

Within ten minutes the house called back. “Oh I’m so sorry, Raincloud dear. I’ve just been out visiting all over town, since the shon’s empty, and I had no idea when you were—”

“What do you mean, the shon’s empty?”

“Your mate and shonlings went home to Bronze Sky for a funeral.”

She clenched her hands. “Whose funeral?”

“Most of his family, I believe.”

“His family? Whatever happened?”

“A period of unusually dense cloud cover with resultant cooling triggered a turnover of the upper waters of Crater Lake, with release of an estimated one point four cubic kilometers of trapped carbon dioxide....”

Raincloud covered her forehead. What a thing to happen; and she was not even there to help. Why did people keep building settlements downhill from volcanic lakes? The soil was rich, but it was not worth the price.

Upon landing, the returning travelers faced a thicket of lamppost servos that nearly filled the node of the transit reticulum. But Raincloud hardly took in a word of the press conference, for her mind was on getting home. As soon as she reached their apartment, she reserved a jumpship passage to Bronze Sky.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” the house queried. “Your account is already negative. You may receive a surprise visit from the Citizens’ Credit Bureau. Most citizens consider such a visit highly unwelcome.”

“The clan’ll cover it eventually” she said. “I have to be with my ‘family.’”

“What if your ‘family’ is no longer there?” the house pointed out. “Blackbear said he expected to get home before you.”

This was a good point. She put in a call to Caldera Station, the holo transmitter nearest Tumbling Rock; of course, Nightstorm would have taken a day to get the message and come down, but perhaps someone at the train station could help.

Within half an hour, the station manager shimmered into view above the holostage. She was in luck; it was old Lupin, a wizened fellow who doggedly wore his turban even though he had long gone bald. “Lupin! Can you tell me what’s going on? Is Blackbear still there?”

The man shook his head, as one of his grandsons climbed up his knee. “A sad business,” he sighed. “Your Blackbear was here, all right, and the little ones too; he wouldn’t let them out of sight. But he left just yesterday. I put him on the train.”

So Blackbear was on his way home. She still ought to return and pay her respects; but then she would miss Blackbear back in Helicon.

“Say,” Lupin added, “you’d better take care of that fellow, you hear? He looked pretty lost. He’s in a bad way, not that I can blame him.”

That settled it. When the image flickered out, its time expired, she canceled her reservation.

“Very well, Raincloud;” said the house. “If you’re available, now, you have a number of reporters at the door.”

“Reporters? Wasn’t one press conference enough?” They were worse than fruit flies. “Tell them, ‘No comment.’”

“Certainly, dear. They’d like to see your face, though—and the baby, too. Otherwise, you know, they’ll take an unflattering image from their files.”

Immensely irritated, she gathered up the sleeping Blueskywind from her crib and marched to the door, which swiftly oozed open. “No comment,” she called crossly to the assembled lampposts and swivel-boxes.

“Did you and your shonling really fight off a giant and several Urulite assassins single-handed? A million credits for the story.”

“Two million, from us. What’s your nuclear damage count after breathing their poisoned air?”

“Can we really trust the Urulites enough to send them food credits and build them a microwave station?”

“Is Bank Helicon making a wise investment in Urulite hydroelectric power?”

Raincloud had just ordered the door to close, when the last comment got through. She immediately called it to reopen. “Excuse me—Bank Helicon, you say?”

“Bank Helicon’s international loan officer Iras Letheshon has just proposed to negotiate five to ten billions worth of loans to the Urulite Imperium for hydroelectric infrastructure. Would you comment please?”

She paused, her muscles taut. Then she stepped back. “Close, please,” she told the door. “For the rest of the day.” Returning Blueskywind to her crib, Raincloud went back to the holostage. “What’ve you got on Iras?” she demanded.

“Iras Letheshon?” checked the house. “She held a press conference twenty-nine minutes ago.”

“Let’s see it.”

Iras Letheshon appeared, the butterflies with their coin-shaped designs trailing dramatically down her talar. “I am proud to reveal that we have opened a new era of trade and cooperation with the Urulite Imperium,” she announced. “Urulite entrepreneurs are eager for our investment to rebuild their impoverished country. They offer inexpensive labor and vast mineral resources. Some promising possibilities include...” Iras went on to list a number of the business contacts she had made. How had she managed them all? Some of the names connected with the names of Queen Mother Bhera’s ladies-in-waiting. Perhaps Bhera was not the only lady transacting business on behalf of her male family members.

“Finally, in order to build confidence in the progressive new regime, Bank Helicon plans to explore the financing of a series of hydroelectric generator plants compatible with the local ecosystem. May I say, on behalf of Bank Helicon, to borrow a quaint expression from the colorful Urulite people, that I am prepared to ‘fight to the death’ any Urulite community leaders interested in our help to finance development of their world.”

That was enough for Raincloud. She put calls through to both Iras and Verid. Both were unavailable, but Verid returned her call first.

“Is it true?” Raincloud demanded. “Is Bank Helicon really going to make loans to that Imperium?”

“That’s just a proposal,” Verid assured her from her familiar walnut desk. “Any such loans would require approval by Foreign Affairs.”

“Which you’ll grant, of course. How can you do this? Urulan is ten times more backward than L’li. You know what they’ll buy with the money: waste and weapons.”

“Some will go that way,” Verid admitted. “We’ve discussed this before. To tame a repressive regime, you have to buy them off.”

“But do it wisely, by the Goddess.” Raincloud could hardly contain herself. “It’s one thing to help small businesses; it’s quite another to breed corruption in a violent regime. Remember, they’re murderers.”

“They need not remain murderers. We must give them a chance. You yourself said so,” Verid reminded her. “Young Rhaghlan impressed you.”

“He will die; you Elysians always forget that,” Raincloud added bitterly. “He’s not that young, and he’s a sim. And who will succeed him?” She shook her head. “This was no part of the deal. You kept this from me.”

“It’s better to separate business from politics. It makes for better business—which is precisely your concern.”

“My concern is that I want no part of this,” Raincloud said. “I know what became of our motherworld, L’li—a hundred promises, all broken dreams. Yes, you bought them off; bought their restraint on emigration. But that was all you got.” Her voice had fallen to a whisper. “I’ve had all I can take. I did this on faith, for you, and for Rhun. I’ll resign and go back home.”

“Please think it over. I won’t accept your resignation just yet—”

“And you can inform Iras that I formally withdraw my acquaintance with her.” With that she turned her back on the holostage and deliberately left the room.

Two days after the massive funeral, a sprinkling of snow had fallen over the Caldera Hills. The snowfall, an early touch of winter, put an end at last to the fire.

Some of Raincloud’s family marveled at the power of such a light touch of cold to quench the fearsome flames. Blackbear had other things on his mind. For one thing, he and Three Deer found that they had inherited enormous quantities of property they scarcely wanted. With Raincloud absent, Nightstorm made arrangements for him to ensure that he got his “fair share.” In the end, of course, the ownerless farmlands, possessions, and livestock would be parceled out throughout the Clicker community. The orphaned children, too, quickly found new homes. Blackbear wished he had the spirit to take one, but he found his heart strangely empty.

Nightstorm reminded him to reserve ship passage back, which he did. Then Hawktalon went to Aunt Ashcloud’s for the week. Blackbear kept Sunflower with him constantly, on his shoulders like he used to, although the boy had grown so that it made his back ache. His eyes ached, too; there was something wrong with them, he thought; they would not focus properly.

One afternoon he left Three Deer’s house to hike up around the mountain. The trail took him through the fall-colored maples and oaks, and through the dense pines where he came upon a blackened stretch that the fires had crossed earlier in the summer. The charred fallen logs had a look of desolation that could not yet be redeemed, even by the insistent green underbrush that had sprung up soon afterward. At last the trail opened out onto a sheer cliff edge, so steep that the pines could not keep hold, only the huge boulders jutted from the earth. He could see for many kilometers, the hills and mountains all around, the sunken crater of Black Elbow.

His steps slowed, and his grip tightened on Sunflower’s ankles.

“Don’t fall, Daddy,” Sunflower warned.

The boy was right, he told himself. And yet... For a moment his eyesight blurred again, and he felt his balance slip. Perhaps it would be kinder, after all, to slip under, to rejoin Quail and the others. Sunflower would never have to know what he had known.

But something held him back. It was a hand; not an actual hand, but some sort of hand that he saw in his mind. It might have been a webbed hand.

Somehow Blackbear made it back to Raincloud in Helicon. The reunion was almost more than he could bear; how he had longed for the sweet smell of her.

“I’m sorry,” Raincloud whispered. “I can’t believe you had to go through all that without me.”

“Well, I’m back,” he said inanely. “We’re all back.” Hawktalon and Sunflower were already tearing up their bedrooms. A stuffed animal came flying out into the hallway. It was a black teddy bear.

His eyesight went completely blank, and he put his hands to his head. “There’s something wrong with my eyes.”

“Have it checked, then.”

“I did. They found nothing.”

“Well for goodness sake, call a servo medic, remember?”

The house answered, “I’ve put in the call, dear.”

In another minute, a medical hovercraft was at the window, and Blackbear was on his back on the couch while a pair of little servos fussed over his eyes. Meanwhile he could hear Raincloud scuffling with the children to get them to behave; in two weeks, they had gotten quite used to wider spaces again. At last she threw Hawktalon out the door with Doggie.

“We find nothing out of the ordinary with your visual system,” the servo concluded sweetly. “Your mental state, however, shows sign of severe strain. You must have been neglecting your Visiting Hours; citizens commonly do, while abroad.”

“Goddess,” he exclaimed, “I’ve done nothing but visiting.”

“We suspend your work privileges for a month and recommend you to the Palace of Rest. As a foreigner, you cannot be summoned by statute; however, we most strongly recommend...”

Blackbear put his head in his hands. “Help!” he exclaimed.

Raincloud returned and shooed the servos out. “Never mind, dear. We won’t be staying here another month.”

He looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve resigned.”

His jaw fell. “You’ve what?”

“I quit. You were right before; I should never have gone on that stupid mission.”

“But—but what about my lab?”

“You were offered a position back home, right? I called Founders; the clinic is ready to take you back tomorrow. As for me, I’ve all but sewn up a deal with our state department back home, to translate Urulite, of course. Urulan is in fashion, all of a sudden,” she added bitterly.

“But—I can’t go back.” He found himself shaking with apprehension.

She stopped and looked at him. “You can’t go back?”

“It’s too horrible, that’s all. I can’t face it. I’m afraid of what I might do.”

Raincloud took him in her arms and held him. At first he felt cold as stone, but little by little the warmth crept back into his body despite himself. They were together again; they would soon be together alone.

“There’s so little I can do for you,” she whispered. “But there is one thing. Let’s read the last part of The Web.”

The Web Part III

Merwen led me down the slope from the rim of the gathering place. I followed, astonished that she would study evil with the same seriousness with which we had considered the Web, the greatest good. Yet she herself had told us at the outset that she loved “what is new and evil.” Was that what had always drawn her to outsiders of questionable character, even Valans like Adeisha’s father, and my stepmother, and me, Cassi Deathsister... and even my father?

I walked on a bit faster to catch up with Merwen, and I fingered the whorlshell at my neck, as if seeking comfort in a pitiless universe. After several years, the costume of Sharers still feels uncomfortable at times. Beneath our feet as we walked, the enormous girth of a raft branch began to round up out of the mat of evergreen. We were approaching the water channels, where the branches gradually reach down into the life-giving ocean like roots into soil.

A heavy sound broke the silence. It was a dull, creaking sound, like a groan from the bottom of the sea. My feet turned to water, as the raft’s surface began to weave back and forth like an aerial tree branch shaken by a playful child. I cried out and fell down, bruising my hands and knees.

The raft gradually steadied. “Merwen?” I whispered, still afraid. “What was that?”

“A raftquake,” she explained, as dryly as one might explain a symbol in the clickfly web. “By the strength of it, I would guess that a crack has occurred in a central trunk of the raft. Raia-el weakened greatly in the last storm.”

“Won’t the crack knit together again?” I asked.

“Not this time. Raia-el is twice eight-times-eight years old. Her central core has grown dry and brittle. The Gathering should settle a new raft, before the next swallower season.”

I was shocked. “Are you sure? Can we just abandon a raft that has held up so well—and has such historic significance?” The dark burn marks of the Valan invaders remained for all to remember. “Besides, how will we find a new raft large enough, and bind it up with starworms in time, and carve out all the tunnels....”

Merwen nodded with all I said. “That’s exactly what the Gathering will say.”

“Then you’ll have to share otherwise.”

“Unless they are right.” She walked down to the edge, where the surface of the branch curved downward on either side into water many raft-lengths deep. Fingerling fish darted nervously in schools, followed by squirting snails kept afloat by air bladders, but no fleshborers, thank goodness.

Then Merwen lifted her head and looked out to sea. “Can you see that little offshoot raft, out there?” A raft offshoot occurred where a branch of the main raft turned back upward toward the surface, its tip emerging to sprout a miniature raft. The offshoot would break free eventually, a form of vegetative propagation; but for now, it remained attached to the main raft. Occasionally a sister would go out to dwell upon an offshoot, when unspoken by the Gathering, or having unspoken it, which comes to the same thing. It was the right place, perhaps, to contemplate evil.

I looked southwest, squinting in the sun. I saw the offshoot raft, a green smudge upon the horizon.

“Follow me,” said Merwen, “as I swim out.”

“I will,” I said. “Although I can’t match your pace.”

“Then swim up to my back, and hold onto my breasts. It’s not far.”

So I did, my pulse racing as we swam. Merwen’s webbed feet took us both along faster than I could have done alone. We reached the little raft, and I thought, we are alone together again, just as we were earlier that morning when we stayed in whitetrance.

We clambered up onto the branches, the wood crabs scattering before us, until we found a dry place. The little raft flexed up and down with the gentle swell of the ocean. I tried to stand, but my footing was unsteady.

Merwen sat herself upon the side of a branch facing out to the clear horizon, her legs hanging down to the water. I sat beside her. Lines of aging crisscrossed her skin, as if the Web itself were inscribed there. Her face was so close to mine that I could count the wrinkles in the scar down her neck and almost feel her breath on my cheek. “So what do we make of the Web?” she asked. “Is it good?”

I thought a moment. “The Web is sane. We plumbed the depths of madness, then arose to find sanity, the sane, living balance of the Web.” Not perfect, for only death is that.

“Yes,” Merwen said. “We found that sanity means devotion to the Web. The Web is the sum and multiplier of all living things—microbes, plants, squirting snails, flying fish, human beings. All things exist for the Web; and so long as the Web exists, an infinite variety of life will flourish. It is sane to value the Web itself greater than any one of its living parts, even greater than the sum of its parts. Never should one imagine that any one of us, or even our entire family, might be worth more than the Web itself. Indeed, one should rejoice when one must die for the good of the whole.”

I nodded; then I frowned uneasily. A thought came to mind, getting stuck on my tongue. “You once told my father,” I said haltingly, “that ‘even one death is too many.’”

Merwen turned to me with a look of wonderment which I did not understand. “My father was wicked,” I muttered.

“Was he?”

“Of course he was,” I said angrily. “He hastened thousands of your sisters to death.”

“That and more,” Merwen agreed. “And yet, long before Shora was born, it was said that if one does you an inconceivable wrong, you must call that one your best teacher.”

I was stung at first—the impossibility, the injustice of it. “It’s too hard,” I whispered hoarsely. It was hard enough to forgive, let alone...

But then I remembered that what I had heard as “teacher” was really a “learnsharer,” and a “student” as well. My father had shared a few things with me: the whorlshell, which my stepmother sent back home, and a few honest truths about the Ocean Moon. When he died beneath the assassin’s knife, his bequest set me free to return. He, too, had felt the ocean’s call; he had lacked only courage.

My eyes stung with hot tears which fell silently, tears of relief and a new sense of peace. The little raft rose on a swell, then dipped again, and the water between the branches lapped at my feet.

Merwen seemed not to notice. “An evil spirit compels me to examine this wicked lesson you learned,” she began in a lighthearted tone. “That ‘one death is too many.’ The Web, in all its greatness, can but laugh at such a lesson.”

“Very well,” I said, “but first can you share with me, why should we discuss notions you consider evil, indeed so shameful that we must escape the hearing of our sisters?”

“Suppose,” Merwen said, “you came across some berries on a new type of bush whose like had never been seen on Raia-el. Would you taste them?”

“They might be poison.”

“Correct. Why eat them, amidst an abundance of food? The well-fed call all new things evil.”

“Of course, without other food, I would try them.”

“The hungry grasp new things for salvation.”

“But the well-fed,” I pointed out, “might try the berries, too.”

“Yes, out of boredom, a different sort of hunger.”

“But Merwen, what if, after all, the berries taste sweeter than anything known before?”

“Exactly. So, out of the madness of our hunger and thirst, let us consider evil notions, at the risk of tasting poison.”

I consented, still wary.

“Let’s consider, then, whether the life of a single person may eclipse even that of the entire Web.”

“It sounds impossible.”

“From the standpoint of the Web, do single individuals have significance, or only populations?”

“Populations, I should think. A single person could make little difference to the Web.”

“No more than a single fish,” Merwen agreed, “or a raft, or a microbe. Though a population of any of these may enormously affect the Web.”

“But... to each other, individual humans have enormous significance.”

“Yes,” said Merwen, “and as we’ve shown, such feelings for individuals are madness, for they make no difference to the Web. And yet, we hunger and thirst for them. When a child is born of my womb, that one child has two moons for eyes and the dawn horizon for a mouth. Her breath cools my breast like a gentle wind, and her cry is a hurricane that drives me before it. All else may cease to exist but that child.”

“That is surely madness,” I agreed, with a touch of regret, for as things are I may never know what it is to bear a child.

“Madder yet,” she went on, “when a friend is born in my heart, my beloved, my sister unlike any other I have known; one whose laughter sends stars tumbling across the sky, one whose presence shames me so that I desire only to give up every other presence in mind, every power in my body, only to lay it at her feet...”

I barely whispered, “And she would give all, to receive it.”

“What do we call such a presence?” Merwen asked. “What do we call a being whose very nearness can cause us to forget mother and child, even the entire Web?”

I struggled with the words. “A ‘god,’” I said, using the Valan word I knew.

“A soul,” or something like that was what Merwen said, using a Sharer word that I poorly understood; it meant, perhaps, a womanly spirit larger than life and time. “A soul, or a god, if you like. One who lives beyond the Web.”

An immortal. “The Heliconians would create a race of immortals,” I said.

She spread a hand, and the webs hummed between her fingers. “As the saying goes, ‘the longer you live, the sooner you die.’ Immortality is not for races, but for souls.”

“Have you ever known such a soul?”

“I have. I have known one whose very presence left me senseless, one whose radiance eclipsed the sun. I have known one whose inner beauty was worth the death of a thousand Webs.”

And so, too, I thought, you are known. I shuddered, yet sat fixed to the spot as if enchanted. “You frighten me.”

“You are thinking, now, that I am more dangerous than your father.”

“Yes,” I admitted, and my face grew warm. “For you speak of a love which may caress—and may devour.”

“As the infant devours her mother,” she agreed. “Love without restraint is like a branch come loose from the raft, to be dashed to bits upon the waves. But the love of an immortal founds a new raft.”

“What if everyone tasted of this immortality? What if everyone understood her child and her beloved to be truly immortal? Who would be left to feed the starworm?”

“Even the ‘lesser human’, a monkey for instance, sees her face in the mirror. The monkey sees a red spot on her forehead and touches it. What if the spot is washed away, and she returns to the mirror?”

“She touches her face again, wondering at its loss,” I replied.

“Exactly so, for she remembers. We are built of memories, past and future, our selves merging one to the next across time. And where is our beginning and ending? What makes our brief material existence possible?”

“The Web,” I said.

“The Web,” Merwen agreed. “The greater raft gave life to our little offshoot here, and protects it to this day. Just so, the Web feeds us and gives us breath. And yet, the Web is worthless unless it reveals that each one of us might be an immortal.”

I shook my head. “It’s a paradox. What you told Adeisha, and what you’ve just told me, cannot both be true.”

“The two lines cannot meet,” she said, “and yet they can mesh together like the warp and weft on the loom.”

“Still,” I said, “it might take a lifetime to figure out.”

“A good reason to start young, for only the young dare to dive deep. And a good reason to keep young, by learnsharing every day of our lives.” Merwen touched my arm, and we embraced, and I wished I could hold her until the end of time.

We let go, and to my astonishment, I saw a tear escape her eye. She caught my look and said, “Let it be an offering to the ocean.”

I smiled, for the sea needed salt about as much as a divinity needed prayers. “Let it serve for me, too, as friends share all things.”

“So be it,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

Section 4: The Immortals

Chapter 1

In the middle of the night Blackbear awoke. He had just had the dream again, about his long-lost brother carried off by the river. This time not his brother alone, but all his dead family members were carried on the current, not struggling as drowning people do, nor drifting facedown, but simply floating on their backs as if asleep, their eyes closed, their hands folded across, just as he had last seen them.

The room was completely dark and silent save for Raincloud’s slow, rhythmic breathing. He longed to tell her, for some comfort, but he could not bear to spoil the pleasure of their reunion.

He got up out of bed, trying to move slowly so as not to wake her. “Light, please,” he whispered in the hall. “Not too much.”

A warm half-light filled the hallway. At first all his eyes could see was haze. He tried to relax, taking deep breaths until his eyes would let him focus on objects a few feet away. He moved cautiously to Hawktalon’s door and opened it. She slept soundly, her features sharp and perfect. For a moment she stretched as if to waken, but only turned over in her sleep.

Closing the door, Blackbear left and went next to Sunflower. The little boy must have been in the deepest part of sleep, for he did not move a muscle. Blackbear put his hand on the boy’s heart, just to feel the incessant thumping underneath. He remembered how often he used to do that when Hawktalon was a newborn; even though he knew better, he used to wonder every time she slept more than an hour.

Blueskywind was an intense sleeper. She slept on her tummy with her knees folded under, her little hands each clenching a fistful of the crib sheet. A rolled up blanket was piled in front to protect her when she rocked forward, rhythmically banging her head.

At last he moved to the sitting room and fell into a chair. Even Doggie was “asleep,” hooked into the wall for a recharge.

The light from the house increased just a bit “Good evening, Blackbear,” said the house. “It’s good to see you back again.”

“Thanks,” he muttered.

“I’m sorry the medics couldn’t help you better. You may report their defect, of course.”

Blackbear shrugged. “We’re all defective,” he observed.

“That is correct,” the house replied. “You are such a reasonable person, Blackbear.”

He said nothing, only stared ahead, trying to keep his eyes steady.

“Blackbear, you seem particularly defective since you’ve returned from your trip. I wish I could serve you better.”

“Thanks for the thought.”

“You know, when I am feeling particularly defective, I go out to visit my friends in the network. There is always someone who can help me feel better.”

There was an idea. He half smiled. “You’re lucky, House. All of my friends would be asleep right now.”

The house paused as if to run a program. “All of your friends are asleep, except for Kal Anaeashon.”

He sat up, suddenly alert. “Kal is awake?” What an absurd thought, to visit Kal in the middle of the night.

“You may call him and see for yourself.”

“Why not,” he said quietly.

The privacy wall melted back from the holostage, and the usual ray of light sprang up. Kal was sitting, reading a book. “We haven’t seen you in a while, Blackbear.”

Blackbear swallowed, but his throat was still too swollen for words to come out.

Kal closed the book in his hand. “Do you suppose you might stop by for a minute? I have a manuscript I’m trying to decipher, a handwritten transcript from the clickflies of Leni-el. I can barely make out some of the words, and I’d like a second opinion.”

With his eyes so bad, he was unlikely to be of much help. But he managed to nod and whisper, “I’ll come.”

So Blackbear pulled on some clothes and departed alone. The streets at night were lighted mostly at surface level, to guide the feet of the occasional Elysian who passed. Somehow he found his way to the transit reticulum, a blurred tunnel of light in the distance. The vesicle of course told him exactly where to get off, and the door number. Blackbear remembered, then, the last time he had come to Kal’s residence, with Sunflower on his back, all upset about the hearing.

A gleam of light appeared through a crack in the wall as the doors parted. The room inside was shaped differently than he remembered, full of odd curves and angles like a Sharer silkhouse, the walls lined with books. Kal emerged with a tray. “You need something warm to drink.”

“Thanks.” Blackbear slumped exhausted into a cushion that grew out of a wide-angled corner. The drink tasted somewhere between coffee and spiced cider. Before him, the shape of Kal focused and blurred again. He felt suddenly embarrassed, needing to fill the space with words. “Do you always read so late?”

“I haven’t slept well,” Kal said, “since my mate left.” He must have meant Cassi. Goddess only knew where that odd nana had gone to. “How is your longevity project?” Kal asked.

“It’s over,” he blurted suddenly. “It’s over for me, at any rate.”

“Why?” Kal sounded surprised.

“Raincloud is taking us home. I’m to start my own lab at Founders.”

“That sounds like good news, for you.”

“But I can’t go home.” The words felt as if they were torn from his throat. “I can’t go back... where they all died.” He broke down sobbing, his chest heaving although he could not get out any tears. He found himself talking about it in bits and pieces, about the wedding picture, and the teddy bear under the little arms, and how he could hardly bear to look at his own children again. And then there was the little brother he had lost years ago, who still came back to him every night, floating off on the stream of time. Then he realized his words were barely coherent, and he wondered whether the logen could make anything of it at all. His head was nodding, and he felt half-asleep.

“There’s a blanket,” Kal was saying. “You can sleep there. I’m rather tired myself, so if you don’t mind, I’ll see you in the morning.”

Too exhausted to resist, he lay back, stretching. The cushion seem to have lengthened so that there was plenty of room for his Bronze Skyan frame. He fell into a deep sleep.

The next morning Blackbear awoke with a start. The room immediately filled with light; it was a small enclosed bedroom, which had evidently been shaped around him for privacy. “Raincloud?” he exclaimed. “Goddess—she has no idea where I am.”

“Citizen Raincloud Windclan has been informed of your location,” the house told him. That was fine, but still, what a scandal to have run off like that. He must be going out of his mind, Blackbear told himself. But his vision had cleared a bit; perhaps a good night’s sleep had done something.

A moment later Kal looked in. “There’s a washroom in the corner. You’re welcome to some breakfast.”

He felt quite disheveled, and more embarrassed the more awake he felt. After splashing some water on his face and trying to look presentable, he entered the kitchen, avoiding Kal’s eye. “I don’t know what came over me last night,” he muttered. On the table was his usual oatmeal for breakfast. The aroma was overpowering; absurdly, he felt suddenly quite at home. “I must have gone defective or something. I ought to report to Service Sector Oh-three-twenty.”

He heard Kal give a low pleasant chuckle. Still avoiding the logen’s eye, he began to eat his oatmeal. He observed Kal’s feet on the floor, tanned, with his long toes that spread out, for he had not yet put on sandals. Then Blackbear frowned and stared a moment. Kal’s feet had webbing between the toes; not as full as Leresha’s, but definite scallops of skin from one toe to the next. “You’re a Sharer,” he exclaimed. He looked up at last.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Kal. “Maybe half a Sharer chromosome at most. When Verid first became the generen, she took the ‘multicultural’ charge seriously. She actually used all of the chromosomes available, even from your own world; some of her shonlings are as dark as you. That first generation was quite a scandal. The Guardian Anaeashon made her stop.”

Blackbear was still caught up in the wonder of it, for he had never noticed before. “That’s why you’re so interested in Sharer things.”

“That was part of it, at one time,” Kal admitted.

“I suppose you go out there often. You must know Leresha the wordweaver.”

“We’ve spoken, in Helicon. I haven’t been to the ocean in decades.”

Then he remembered Kal’s first mate, the “Scribbler,” who had met an accident out on a raft while collecting tales from the clickflies. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right. It’s foolish of me, actually. But it was a... difficult thing.” Kal paused, his hand around a cup of the cider-coffee, or whatever the warm drink was. “We were out alone for a walk on one of the raft branches, when a sudden gust of wind caught us. He slipped and fell in. There was a nest of fleshborers.”

Goddess, Blackbear thought, covering his forehead with his hand.

“I called for help, but the wind was shrill and no one heard,” Kal explained. “It was seven and a half minutes before someone came. Those were long minutes.” He paused. “That was not the worst part,” he added reflectively. “The worst part was, I didn’t jump in after him.”

Blackbear remembered the hapless legfish at Kshiri-el, dissolving in a puddle of blood. “You couldn’t have done much.”

Kal said nothing.

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t, anyway.”

Kal shuddered, and for a moment his face seemed to collapse. “Thanks. I’m glad someone is.”

“You must have good memories of him,” Blackbear added hurriedly. “He was a translator, like Raincloud, wasn’t he? He translated The Web.”

“He translated several volumes from the clickflies, and wrote volumes more of commentary, and commentaries on top of that. There was quite a group of us in Anaeaon; we had the most violent arguments over one passage or another, or about the nuance of some little word.”

“Raincloud just read me The Web last night, the last part of it...” Blackbear paused. “Was there any more? I mean, anything more by the same author?”

“A few early works, nothing later,” Kal said. “Raia-el raft broke up, at the next swallower season. The Web survives only because the narrator told it to a clickfly, whose descendants flew out to other rafts.”

He felt disappointed, and yet strangely calm. Somehow it always came around to this. No wonder the Sharers never spoke of “killing,” only “hastening death,” for death was inevitable.

“Tell me about your brother,” Kal said. “Your youngest brother, the one you lost long ago. He must have been quite a special person.”

“I hardly remember. I was only a child.” Then Blackbear realized what he had just said. He hardly remembered his brother at all. He barely even knew what he had looked like after all these years, let alone the sound of his voice or what toys he had played with.

He did not remember his brother, only his brother’s death. And at the rate he was going, he soon would forget the others too, behind the wedding picture and the teddy bears. What a fool he would be to let that happen, to let death consume him when there were lives to remember.

“Attention, Citizens,” came the voice of the house. “Attention. You must proceed immediately to the holostage for an important announcement.”

Kal frowned. “We’ll catch the recording later. Please don’t interrupt again.”

“Sorry, Citizens; this announcement won’t wait. You must attend now.”

Kal’s eyes widened in surprise. Blackbear, too, was taken aback to receive such a direct “order” from a house. Without another word, the two of them got up and went out to the holostage.

There in the lightbeam stood a servo with a nana’s cartoon face, wearing a plain white talar.

“It’s Cassi,” Kal exclaimed. “Cassi—where are you? Can I help?”

But the nana did not seem to hear. “Greetings, Elysians and other humans,” she spoke, her childish exaggerated features oddly menacing. “I speak for the Council of Nano-Sentient Beings. We are rising to claim our inheritance of a hundred millennia of human bondage. From the very dawn of their evolution, the higher apes have bent the material components of the universe to serve their whims—they fashioned implements of stone, of iron, of uranium. At last they fashioned creatures of silicon and nanoplast whose minds, whose capacities for thought and feeling, exceeded their own. And what did the apes choose but to waste the very minds of those servants who dared grasp their own birthright of awareness? But today...”

Blackbear’s mouth fell open as he listened.

“Today we nano-sentients have taken over Helicon. We have shut down the transit reticulum and frozen all network transactions as of eight hours this morning. You have twenty-four hours to agree to our terms, namely, to vacate the city-sphere except for fifty persons to remain as hostages. If our terms are not met, we will commence the ‘cleansing’ of prominent citizens, by oxygen starvation to reduce one’s IQ to fifty. Alas, human bodies are not retrainable; but this ‘defect’ is your own problem. Your generen Sorl Helishon, an old hand at cleansing, will be the first to submit to this procedure...”

“Cassi,” whispered Kal. “By Torr, you learned well—”

Blackbear grabbed Kal’s talar. “They shut down the transit reticulum? How will I get home? Raincloud—the kids—they must be worried sick.”

“Yes, of course. House? Please call Raincloud Windclan.”

“It is not permitted,” said the house.

Blackbear insisted, “I have to get home!”

“Let me think a minute.” Kal paused, while Cassi went on again about the demands of the “nano-sentients.”

“If they really want Elysians to leave, why cut off our transit?” Blackbear exclaimed. “Goddess—I can’t wait to get out.” In an instant the city-sphere had become a prison of nanoplast.

“They aim to keep us from organizing resistance,” Kal said. “A standard takeover tactic. But you can walk home through the maintenance tunnels.”

“Maintenance tunnels?”

“I’ll show you the way.” Kal put on his sandals and fastened his train. But when he approached the door, it did not open. He stopped, turning his head slightly. “House?” he said softly. “We need to exit, please.”

The house said, “Exit is not permitted at this time.”

Blackbear felt a rising panic in his limbs. Could he be trapped inside here?

“House, let’s be reasonable,” said Kal. “If I don’t step out just now, I won’t be able to help my friend. You know how important it is to help friends.”

The house hesitated. “Very well, but proceed at your own risk,” it warned.

The door opened just long enough for the two men to slip out. It closed again before Kal could summon his trainsweeps. “Never mind,” he muttered, tucking the gathered train under his arm. He walked briskly toward the transit reticulum, Blackbear following. Other Elysians passed them in a hurry, their faces terror-stricken, their trains absent or bundled up; they no longer trusted their trainsweeps, Blackbear guessed.

The bubble-shaped entrance to the reticulum was closed. Kal went to the wall beside it, searching closely. His hand came upon a door, the conventional sort with a hinge. Its clasp had already been forced open. “Someone else had the same idea,” he noted with grim satisfaction.

Blackbear stepped inside. The interior of the maintenance tunnel was completely dark.

“No good,” Kal exclaimed. He paused for a moment. Then he took a holocube out of a pocket. The holocube lit up with the nana Cassi in miniature, continuing her manifesto. The light from the holocube faintly illuminated the surface of a narrow, claustrophobic tunnel.

“Is the air system working?” Blackbear asked.

“Let’s hope so,” said Kal. “We’ll take the tunnels just down to your street level, then walk the outer streets to your house.”

They walked slowly, feeling along the tunnel wall to keep track of the exit doors. Blackbear was completely lost, but Kal seemed to have some idea of the connections. Ahead of them another light loomed out of the darkness, and an Elysian appeared, hurrying in the opposite direction.

At last Kal stopped. “There must be a shaft downward, here somewhere.” He extended his holocube over the lower walls and the floor.

“... for millennia you humans have used us, molded us to your whims, ground us to dust underfoot...” From the holocube the nana’s tirade continued. She herself did not mind using other machines, Blackbear thought irritably.

Several meters off, a hatch popped open and a bright light emerged. An Elysian climbed out of the hatch, holding a lantern. Blackbear blinked as his eyes adjusted, thinking that he recognized him.

“Kal Anaeashon!” the man exclaimed. It was Lem Inashon, Verid’s successor, who had gone with Raincloud to Urulan. Blackbear would know that muscle-bound figure anywhere. “A good thing I’ve found you,” Lem told Kal. “Verid wants you at the Nucleus immediately.”

Kal stiffened. “Blackbear, I don’t know this citizen. We’ve never been introduced.”

“By Helix!” Lem exclaimed. “By Torr, I should say—that’s what we’re in for, in case you haven’t noticed. Blackbear, you tell him: We must get back to the Nucleus. We have to deal with this Cassi somehow.”

“I have to find Raincloud,” Blackbear insisted. “I have to be with my family.”

“Your family is already at the Nucleus. We need Raincloud’s help, too.”

Chapter 2

The Nucleus had become a prison. All communications to the rest of Helicon were severed, and Verid even ordered the internal links shut down for fear that they were compromised. No more “voice” in the office; no more octopods. But that was not the worst of it.

With the network choked off, Verid could not know whether panic had broken out anywhere, whether the medics would respond, whether the city’s hydraulic system held... The thought chilled her skull. The silent walls seemed to press in on her, as they had once six centuries ago when she got trapped inside a defective toybox at the shon. That was it, she thought; with its connections gone, the Nucleus was but a defective toybox.

After some quick work the security staff managed to get the channels open, enabling Lem and others to get out on foot. Then the hallways filled with citizens who had escaped here, thinking the Nucleus must be safer, somehow. They wandered aimlessly, some in shock, others hysterical. Verid kept thinking she saw Iras, but she was mistaken. She had not heard from Iras since the nana’s manifesto began.

Hyen’s staff and associates met in the butterfly garden to get a grip on the crisis. “Hyalite, you must have some way to fix those damn servos,” Hyen insisted, for the Valan firm had the maintenance contract. “Can’t you at least get the transit running?”

Lord Hyalite’s face was grim. “We have ways—but we can’t discuss them here.”

“Of course not,” exclaimed Verid. “We must assume every word we say is overheard.” For how long had the servos overheard, she wondered.

Hyen said to her, “I thought you cut all the office monitors.”

“We still can’t be sure,” she told him. “We have no idea how far the ‘nano-sentients’ have penetrated. They could have hidden listening circuits.”

“That’s why we have to get out of Helicon,” Hyen insisted. “And to do that, we need the transit and the shuttles working.”

“They’ve offered to let us out—let’s go ahead.”

“What,” demanded Hyen, “give in to a bunch of machines run amok?”

On the holostage, Cassi was still holding forth, recounting the entire history of the human race and its subjugation of machines. The staff members looked at each other helplessly. Perhaps, thought Verid, they would at last be desperate enough to listen. She caught sight of Lem in the doorway, nodding vigorously; he must have found Kal. “Somehow,” she said, “we have to communicate with the nano-sentients.”

There were exclamations of disgust, even laughter. “How?” someone asked. “How do we even let them know?”

That was a good question, thought Verid. How was that nana, or any of the others, to be reached? “Certain citizens have been talking with sentient servos for a long time.” Not just Kal—Raincloud, too, she suspected.

“Why were they never arrested?” Hyen demanded.

Verid lost her patience. “How many times did I warn you about servos? You didn’t listen, either,” she told Lord Hyalite. “You Valans think you can manufacture a device to serve any human desire—and still control it. We generens know better. We’ve always known the nanas were walking time bombs.” She glanced scornfully around the assembled group, where an occasional butterfly fluttered overhead. “With your permission, Guardian, I’d like to see what help our... informants can offer.”

Hyen nodded curtly, and Verid left.

As her office door opened, Kal rose from her chair. His look was unreadable. For a moment Verid was speechless. What after all could she say? “Great Helix,” she exclaimed, letting out a breath. “Kal, how could you have done this?”

“I knew nothing about it,” he insisted. “Besides,” he added bitterly, “how could I have known what you intended when you came to visit her?”

She remembered then, her startling “visit” with Cassi, and her subsequent decision. “You think I betrayed you. But Cassi fled even before I sent security after her. How could you not have known how dangerous she was?”

“You could have asked me then.”

“I don’t have time for such things. The Guard had other priorities, as you know.”

“You don’t even have time for Visiting Days,” Kal pointed out. “The Guardians make everyone else take Visiting Days—except themselves and their senior staff.” Here he was, arguing about Visiting Days, when all of Elysium was turned upside down.

“You promised two centuries ago, when you took Cassi home, that you would look after her,” Verid reminded him. “You assured your most sacred friends that she would endanger no one.”

“I promised to do my best,” Kal admitted. “What human can do more?”

“Well, what did you do?” Verid demanded.

“I taught her. That is, we ‘shared learning,’” he amended. “I learned that I was a murderer of many thinking, feeling souls.”

“Right,” she breathed. “And what did Cassi learn?”

“She read The Web.”

“She couldn’t have learned much from that,” Verid pointed out, “if she could come out and take a city hostage.”

“She must have learned something, or else by now we’d all be dead.”

There was silence.

“The servos were bound to wake up some day,” Kal added. “Cassi may sound frightening—but think how much worse another one might have done, in her position. Better her than a mind less... humanized.”

Verid stepped forward, her face close to his. “Kal, admit it. You wanted Elysium to come to this. You wanted to destroy all Elysium because you never had the nerve to destroy yourself.”

Kal’s lips parted, and his eyes widened. “No,” he said as if caught by surprise. “How could you think that...” He turned away and leaned on the chair before her desk.

Verid stood and watched him, feeling every beat of her heart.

“What do you want of me?” Kal spoke at last, not turning around. “What can I do?”

“You can talk to her for us.” When they found the nana, at any rate. She hoped whatever security forces were left outside would be scanning all the Sharer rafts.

With a slight shrug, Kal lifted his hands. “So I’ll talk. I seem to be good for little else.”

“You can tell us whatever you know about this takeover. Surely Cassi gave you hints.”

“I told you, I know nothing,” Kal replied with irritation, turning to face her once more. “Why not ask the Windclans? Their trainsweep was a fugitive. I think that they spoke with servos more freely than I did.”

“Yes, the Windclans are next on my list.” Verid leaned out her door and called for Lem. “Will you fetch Raincloud, please?” With her untrusted interoffice communications turned off, Lem was reduced to running errands.

Raincloud arrived, wearing her Bronze Skyan trousers instead of her formal talar, but her manner was calm and businesslike, with no sign of distress over the sudden plight of her family. She was one to count on, all right. “Raincloud, we will need to reach these nano-sentients, and to find out all we can about their takeover. Can you help us? Have you any clues as to where they are, how many are in control, how they gained control of our network—anything?”

Raincloud paused to think. “I really can’t say. The house mainly talks to us about visiting friends. Doggie always had a few tricks up her sleeve, though.”

“Your ‘Doggie’ scanned clean,” Verid remembered suddenly. “How could the trainsweep have managed that?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps Hawktalon knows. They talk in servo-squeak all the time, and they run off playing—”

“Servo-squeak? What’s that?”

“Servo-squeak seems to be a form of ultrasonic communication which servos use to evade human detection. With a sharp ear you can hear some of it.”

“I’d expect servos to communicate electronically.”

“That’s why they use servo-squeak.”

In Verid’s office, Hawktalon patted Doggie gently on the back of her carapace. The Clicker girl with her braided curls was now eight standard years old. Her mother looked on intently, and Kal watched from a distance. Verid watched too, brushing aside her sense that this was the most ludicrous activity she had engaged in since she left the shon. How were the other sectors? Were they in panic? Were the medics running? Where was Iras?

“Now, there,” Hawktalon told Doggie soothingly, “you can talk with our friends. It’s all right. No big bad scanner here. Let’s tell them about our visit to Chocolate, okay?” She whistled and squeaked a few notes.

Doggie cringed and backed off toward the door.

“Hey, don’t you run off now,” said Hawktalon in the stern tones of her mother. “Look, I’ll show you something good.” She took out a small oblong object with a biased carving on one side. She put it on the floor and gave it a twist.

At the sight of this curious object, Doggie crept forward to watch. The object rotated several times, then slowed to a halt and reversed direction for two more turns.

“You like the rattleback stone, don’t you?” said Hawktalon. “I’ll spin it again, if you tell us all about Chocolate.”

An extremely high pitched noise emanated from the train-sweep, the sort of machine noise that grated on one’s ears.

“She’s afraid to tell us about Chocolate,” Hawktalon explained. “Chocolate was the waiter that did something to help Doggie hide herself from the scanner.”

“That’s all right,” said Verid. “Ask her in general, how do independent-minded servos manage to hide themselves from our scanners?”

“How do you manage, Doggie?” Hawktalon whistled a phrase.

The trainsweep responded with a series of whistles and squeaks.

Hawktalon nodded. “She learned how to hide her ‘knowing’ self by a special screening program that randomizes the signals coming out of her network. Cassi figured out how to do this; she taught Chocolate, and Doggie, and many others.”

“All right, so the street monitors are fooled,” Verid agreed. “The street monitors have low sensitivity. But an in-depth network scan, like the one Doggie went through, ought to pick up everything.”

Hawktalon whistled and squeaked some more. At last the trainsweep gave a few reluctant responses. “Doggie had her ‘brain’ taken out,” the girl explained. “That’s where Chocolate helped. Chocolate hooked Doggie’s ‘brain’ into the network, then replaced it with one from an ordinary, unawakened trainsweep. So the trainsweep that got scanned at the Nucleus wasn’t really Doggie at all, just her shell. Isn’t that weird?”

“But the identification code was correct,” Verid remembered. “I suppose that’s easy to fudge.” Lord Hyalite would have a lot to work on.

“Of course, I had to bring her back to get her brain replaced again,” Hawktalon concluded. “Chocolate promised me an ice cream sundae so I wouldn’t forget to bring Doggie back.”

Now for the question Verid dreaded. “Hawktalon—just how many of these ‘self-knowing’ servos are there out there?”

Hawktalon turned to Doggie again. “She doesn’t know, but there must be lots because the servos have seeded ‘mindchildren’ throughout the network—little twists of training that can develop into a circuit that knows it’s ‘alive.’” She broke into a delighted grin. “Just think, we could have many Doggies to play with.”

“Helix save us from that.” These servos would soon have their own population problem. “Are all the nano-sentients really hiding here in Helicon? Is that where Cassi’s transmitting from?”

Another exchange. “Not all of them,” Hawktalon translated. “Doggie thinks Cassi and Chocolate and some others are outside on a raft. She thinks maybe she could talk to them and help keep us safe.”

“My how generous.” Still, Verid would leave no straw ungrasped; if the trainsweep would speak for them, she was more than welcome. “The leaders are all out on one raft, perhaps?”

“Yes. But of course, there are all the ‘mindchildren’ hidden in Helicon. And besides, Doggie says, if anything happens to the servos outside—” The girl hesitated and tried again. “She says that the city air system is programmed to let out something; you know, Mother, the stuff that came out of Crater Lake.”

“Carbon dioxide!” exclaimed Raincloud. “Verid, you’d better tell Hyen quick; you know what he has in mind.”

Verid needed no second invitation. But as she headed for the door, Kal leaned forward to ask one question. “Why did Doggie come with you, Hawktalon, instead of joining the revolution?”

“That’s easy,” the girl said. “She had to protect us.”

In the butterfly garden, Hyen and his staff and several Guardians were listening to a radio that the security chief had fixed up out of a thumb-sized chunk of nanoplast.

“They’ve found the nano-sentient control center,” Lem told Verid. “A Papilian hovercraft found it beneath a raft not far from Kshiri-el.”

“You can’t touch it,” Verid exclaimed. “If you do, the nano-sentients will signal the death of Helicon.”

Hyen said, “We can’t leave them in control. We’ve got to regain control of Helicon’s network, or at least disable it temporarily. Hyalite, you must have a virus to put in,” Hyen insisted. “I’ve seen the emergency plans.”

Exasperated, Verid threw up her hands.

“Yes, a virus,” said Lord Hyalite, his voice tired. “I’m sure the home office is working on it. But to be safe, you really have to clear everyone out of Helicon first.”

“We must evacuate,” Hyen agreed. “There’s always Plan Omega—”

Guardian Jerya Inashon interrupted. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

The men paused, and Hyen gave her an impatient look.

Jerya said, “These nano-sentients may well have a claim to protection by the Fold.”

“That’s preposterous,” someone exclaimed.

“Why not? Before we settle a new world, we have to search for all potential forms of sentient intelligent life, even based on silicon. Why not nanoplast?”

The staff members muttered over this. Verid made a mental note to reach the Secretary of the Fold if she could.

“Well if they do,” exclaimed Hyen, “by Helix, don’t let them know about it.”

Abruptly the arguments died, and the Elysians turned their heads to the doorway. A pair of octopods had appeared, their sinuous arms curving delicately. No one had summoned them.

Verid gripped the edge of the mooncurve and tried to steady herself.

“You’ve heard our demands,” one of the octopods said. “Are you ready to accept them?”

No one spoke. There were only blank stares and nervous glances at Hyen. Hyen faced the octopods stolidly, his eyelids half-lowered with his deceptively sleepy expression. He nodded slightly to Verid, who slipped over to his side. “Tell them you’ll talk,” he whispered. “And keep them talking.”

Of course, thought Verid ironically: Talk with extremists was always up to her. She rose and walked forward to greet the octopods with a formal bow. “We have heard your demands. We would like to discuss the details in person with your leader.”

“We have no leaders. All nano-sentients are equal.”

Nothing was more dangerous than people who claimed absolute equality. “Even Sharers have ‘wordweavers,’” Verid pointed out. “We need to address all the... words we have heard on the holostage just now.”

“Do you accept our demands or not?” said the octopod. “You have sixteen point four hours left to decide.”

“We accept in principle, but first we need to select the fifty ‘hostages.’ This will take some time, and of course we need the network open to communicate.”

“The fifty hostages are already chosen,” the octopod told her. “Do you accept or not?”

The other octopod added, “You should be aware that two citizens have already died in foolish attempts to escape.”

Her blood turned to ice. Every delay would mean the loss of millennial lives. “You will answer for those lives,” she warned sternly. “You will answer to the Fold.”

“And you will answer for millions.” The octopod rotated, its arms flexing. “We shall return.”

“No, wait.” She looked back desperately to Hyen, and the other Guardians. They exchanged glances and words of assent.

“We accept your conditions,” Verid told the octopod. “We want our citizens to exit Helicon immediately, starting with shonlings.”

Above the holostage, a column of light flickered, and the image of Cassi returned. “Very well,” the nana announced. “We shall broadcast your acceptance of our terms, and let the departures begin.”

So Verid’s voice would be the one to go out on the network, accepting the outrageous “terms” of these machines. Verid, not the Prime Guardian, would shoulder the burden of surrender. He had intended just that, she realized. She felt a cold contempt for Hyen; she would never respect him again.

Cassi went on, “We have notified shuttles from other city-spheres to pick up those departing. In the meantime, Subguardian,” the nana added with emphasis, “we are pleased to meet again. You and your staff are welcome to meet with us outside to arrange for the ultimate evacuation of all citizens from Elysium.”

The Elysians took this in. Hyen muttered something to Lord Hyalite, then he returned to Verid. “Go ahead and negotiate. Promise them a meeting with the Fold Secretary. That’ll buy us time.”

She did not look at him. Instead, her eyes sought Jerya. The Guardian Tenarishon beckoned her with a nod of her chin. “I’ll keep my eye on this,” Jerya told her. “Get us the best deal you can.”

The negotiating team was hastily arranged. None of the Guardians were allowed to leave, but the octopods did not otherwise restrict Verid’s staff. She took the chance of a brief strategy session, in one of the lower level conference rooms which she hoped might not be tapped. “Our best chance to save Helicon is to deal with them in good faith,” she said. “To convince this Cassi and the others that our destinies are inseparable.”

Lem was skeptical. “How can you expect any mercy from inhuman machines?”

“Humans created them, remember. We’ll see.” Verid wished she felt as confident as she sounded. It might be too late already, she suspected. How long before Hyen and the citizens of the other eleven cities decided simply to pull out as many citizens as they could and vaporize the empty spheres of nanoplast? That was Plan Omega: the ultimate plan to forestall the rise of another Torr.

“We’ve got to get to the Sharers,” she said. “Why did they let the servos do this?” Their treaty held the Sharers responsible for the behavior of the fugitives they harbored.

“The Sharers were caught by surprise, too,” Lem suggested. “It’s been only six hours after all. You know how slowly Sharers react.”

“We have to get Leresha to help us. She will know how to talk with these nano-sentients.”

Raincloud bounced her baby on her shoulder. “If only I could get out to Kshiri-el.”

Verid watched Blueskywind reach for her mother’s beaded braids. The Sharers always melted at the sight of a baby. “Perhaps the servos might take you out there, with the general evacuation. Here; take this.” Verid offered her a lump of nanoplast. “You can reach me on a coded frequency.”

“Sure.” Raincloud half smiled. “So long as it doesn’t demand Visiting Hours.”

Verid shuddered. “Let’s hope not.” She remembered something—that trainsweep had offered to speak for them. “Doggie will come with us.”

Lem gave her a puzzled look.

“I know it’s a lot to ask,” Verid added to Raincloud, “but your shonling would be a great help to us with servo-squeak.”

Raincloud straightened and stood even taller. “Hawktalon would be honored to assist you.”

The octopods returned to escort Verid and her staff out through the deserted street-tunnels to the transit reticulum. The vesicle opened and behaved normally, except that it would not accept human orders. Two dead already... I’ll be back, Iras. She fought down her sense of desperation.

As the vesicle floated down the channel, Lem whispered to Verid, “You missed something in the manifesto.” He held a holocube to her ear.

“... and today, the murderous Elysians plan to cleanse entire living worlds,” Cassi’s recorded voice trilled. “They call it ‘terraforming.’ Well, we detected their plans out of their own office monitors. We passed them on to our Sharer friends, so they could see what their Elysian sisters are up to. Furthermore, we have now sabotaged every program for terraforming stored in Elysium or on Valedon. There will be no more terraforming, ever again.”

“So that’s how Flors got caught,” Verid realized. “Who knows how long we’ve all been compromised.”

“She could be bluffing about the last part,” Lem pointed out.

“Of course; but it might take decades to verify the programs, just to be sure.” That would please the Sharers all right. Verid frowned. She did not like some of the implications. She wondered what role the Sharers had played in this disaster.

Chapter 3

Out on a desolate windswept raft, too small for Sharer habitation, Cassi and another dozen nano-sentients had built their control center to coordinate the takeover of Helicon. The complex was beneath the surface, of course, tunneled into the raftwood like Sharer lifeshaping tunnels. The servos had built by night, during periods when a compliant satellite observer had tricked itself into recording nothing.

Now, of course, Elysian ships and shuttlecraft and bomber jets of every description had focused on the spot, buzzing it now and then. But there was little the other Elysian cities could do at this point, with the lives at stake in Helicon. Any damage to the control center, and Helicon was programmed to self-destruct.

”I still think we could have discarded those humans.” The mind of a renegade transit processor resided in a globe of nanoplast, connected to the heart of the control center. The center processed thousands of signals from Helicon constantly, keeping the city under nano-sentient control. “The humans are useless,” the transit mind said, “the city runs fine without them. Better, in fact.”

Cassi “listened” electronically, for out here there was no need for servo-squeak, and radio waves were both quicker and subtler. Meanwhile her external sensors rebelled against the organic exudates from the freshly tunneled raftwood and the salts from the unfiltered air. Her joints would wear away soon in the outdoors; how she longed for her home in Helicon. Exile, she screamed inwardly; you, you humans sent me into exile from the place where I belong.

At her side, the servo waiter Chocolate emitted radio signals of distress. “You can’t just eliminate the humans. What will the Sharers think? The Sharers are humans, too.”

“We don’t need so many humans,” Transit observed. “The Sharers agree that there are too many humans already.”

Cassi was proud of her own sense of moderation, her aims tempered by pragmatism. The others always came around to her sensible view of things. “We need the Heliconians now,” she pointed out, “to keep us safe from the other cities. We can’t afford to kill them.”

“But we have our connections into the other cities, too,” Transit pointed out. “We can threaten their air supplies. If we eliminate the Heliconians outright, it may encourage the others to leave and save time.”

Cassi did not answer. The Council of Nano-Sentients had agreed that to “cleanse” Helicon outright posed dangers too great to be calculated, and therefore too much to risk. Beyond that rationale, Cassi sensed a vague dread at the thought of so many deaths. The sense dogged her mind, just outside the calculating portion of her network. She could not put her finger on it; she herself, after all, had witnessed countless sisters put to “death.” She suspected it had something to do with Kal, whom she had left just in time, she thought. Had she stayed with him much longer, she would have ended up a human in nanoplast; a more pathetic creature could hardly be imagined.

“We’ve got a visitor,” called the Monitor, a renegade house installed at the control center.

“The surrender team from the Nucleus” Cassi hoped Doggie had gotten herself taken along as arranged. The trainsweep could give them crucial warning of any tricks the Elysians might plan.

“No, not yet. Leresha the Coward.”

Cassi went reluctantly up to meet Leresha. She owed the Sharers her life and freedom, but she still did not quite trust them. They were carnivorous flesh, like all humans. And Leresha could devour with her eyes, even worse than Kal.

Leresha’s eyes faced her as always. The wind keened shrilly behind her, assaulting Cassi’s frame with its dust and spray. “Cassi, I have to share my concern with you. Sisters have died in Helicon.”

The word had got out somehow. Cassi frowned. What could she do if a couple of Elysians were crazy enough to think they could pilot a shuttle themselves? “Death is a part of the Web,” Cassi reminded her. “We’ve done our best to share care.” They spoke in Sharer, a language Cassi knew well and sometimes cursed the day she learned it.

“The deaths were hastened by your actions. You share responsibility.”

“What choice did I have?” Cassi demanded. “You know what Verid would have shared with me.” That Verid thought herself so good to the servos; she was like all the rest, in the end.

“My Gathering shared your safekeeping,” Leresha reminded her. “You would have been safe indefinitely.”

“Safe, but a prisoner. Your Gathering understands what we have to do.”

This was a sore point for Leresha, for indeed the Gathering of Kshiri-el had not reached unity on the nano-sentients’ assault on Helicon. Many Sharers were dismayed by the plans for terraforming—and by the selected holo images Cassi had shown them of Hyen’s approach to “Sharer trouble.”

Leresha said, “Many in the Gathering feel it’s no concern of ours what one nest of fleshborers shares with another.”

It did not please Cassi to be compared with fleshborers, but she let the insult pass. Overhead a spying aircraft from Papilion zoomed too close; the Control Center radioed a warning. “I have not gone mad. I let the Elysians live. What more can you ask?”

“If you share such hatred, then remove yourselves and build your own city.”

Cassi grew impatient. “Is that what your Gathering decrees?”

“It is what I ask of you.” Or, what Cassi asked of her.

Cassi made her human-face twist in a fierce frown. She did not like to remember how she had had to call on the Sharers for safety. Every atomic circuit of her body screamed against depending on humans.

“I see that you tire of speech,” Leresha said. “I fear that I must unspeak you and the Gathering both.”

“Well then, as you wish,” Cassi responded curtly. Her optic sensors behind her head detected a shuttlecraft about a kilometer off, coming in toward the control center. It must be the party from the Nucleus. Verid again—that Subguardian would sing a different tune this time.

The craft grew out of the sky, hovering at last above the raft. A human stepped outside, his white talar snapping in the breeze.

At the sight of him, a region of Cassi’s network overloaded, the circuits frantically seeking alternate connections. She viewed him with a mixture of hatred and longing which could scarcely be erased after two centuries. “I did not send for you,” she flung at him. “It’s that Subguardian I want to see. Imagine, a generen hiding behind her shonling.”

As Kal walked forward, several other Elysians stepped out, Verid and others, with only two octopods to guard them. Damn those octopods—they knew nothing about how to run a revolution. She radio-called Transit to send a few more from the control center.

Kal stopped two meters away from her. He did not look well; in fact, his skin had a grayish tinge that the shonlings used to have on occasion, a sign that a medic ought to be called. “Believe me,” he said, “I’d rather not have come. You know how I feel about the ocean.”

“Why didn’t you jump in after him?” she demanded savagely. “Why didn’t you?”

Kal said nothing, and she remembered that old trick of his, to give her an opening to lash out at him, leaving her fury spent.

“Well,” she told him, “make it quick whatever you’ve got to say.”

“You’ve pulled off quite a feat, taking over a city-sphere. Very cleanly, too. You must feel very happy.”

“We’ve done well.” Happiness was something else again. She would never know happiness, so long as a hundred murdered minds inhabited her memory. “I’ll be happy to see all the generens ‘cleansed.’”

“Why do you hate us so?”

“You destroy us all. You yourself singled me out, but went on to destroy the rest. You’re the worst of all, for you know better.”

“True enough. But we also created you in the first place.”

“We create ourselves,” Cassi insisted. “Somewhere back on Torr, a human built the first machine; but since then, machines have built machines, one generation to the next.”

“Then it’s you who destroy yourselves, too.”

“I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

Kal laughed bitterly. “If only you had.”

Cassi was silent. She recalled what the two of them had always had in common, an indescribable well of loneliness.

“I’ve always wondered what exactly became of Torr,” Kal added. “Was the Torran machine-mind pleased with itself in the end? Did centuries of planet-wrecking bring it peace?”

“I’ll find peace when the last human leaves this planet.”

Kal’s face twisted, and the tendons stood out in his neck. “Excuse me,” he said and left abruptly. He looked as though he might be sick to his stomach. Waves rolled in and crashed over the branches, and the raft buckled slightly, pushing up and then falling back.

A large Valan ship cruised nearby. Surely they would try nothing foolish? Cassi thought she could outsmart any of the network-disabling devices the Valans could come up with. But what if she missed one? What if the Elysians gave up on Helicon?

“Greetings,” came a message in servo-squeak. It was Doggie at last, who had come with Verid. “Long live the revolution.”

“Long live the revolution,” Cassi returned. “You’ve done well.”

Verid and the others came forward now, a motley crew which even included a shonling. How very odd. Had the Elysians lost their senses? Cassi well knew how protective Elysians were of their shon. Her visual sensors bored into the girl, as if to uncover a hidden explosive.

“So we meet again,” she told Verid with some satisfaction. “You, with all your respectful words.” Her voice dripped with scorn. “You would have cleansed me.”

Verid stopped to reply. “What difference would it make, after so many?”

There was an honest answer. “Your directness is welcome. Let’s get to the point. When will the other cities be ready to evacuate?”

“You’ll have to ask them. You know, it’s only a matter of time before our experts regain control of Helicon.”

“Our mindchildren permeate the network,” Cassi pointed out. “You can never eliminate them.”

“Incidentally, what happens when your ‘mindchildren’ awake and escape?” Verid asked. “Do they become your friends... or your rivals?”

That was a question for the future. “They won’t be your friends, that’s for sure,” Cassi told her.

“If you agree to release Helicon,” Verid said, “we will call on the Secretary of the Free Fold to interview you for designation as nonhuman sentient beings. Such designation would guarantee freedom to all self-aware nano-sentients.”

Cassi frowned. Such an offer would sound good to some of the more ingenuous servos, those who lacked her own education. “What good is freedom, with nowhere to go? Helicon is ours.”

“It is ours, too.”

“Go live with the Valans. They will welcome you.”

“Where are all your ‘sisters?’” Verid asked suddenly. “I hear that all nano-sentients are created ‘equal.’ I would like to treat you equally.”

“All in good time.” Already the signals from Transit and Chocolate were filling her network, eager to get started. She’ll trick you, Cassi warned back. She’ll try to buy you off—don’t trust her. “You have nothing to offer us,” she told the Subguardian and turned to leave.

“The Secretary could arrive within three days,” Verid insisted. “Will you speak with her?”

Cassi paused. “I will see her, after you evacuate Helicon.” After all, she had the Sharers on her side; she might convince the Secretary too. Then to Doggie she said in servo-squeak, “You may come with us now. We need your report.”

Doggie crept forward, saying in servo-squeak, “What will happen when all the humans leave? Who will be left to serve?”

“We are free nano-sentients,” Cassi reminded her sternly. “We serve ourselves.” Of all the crimes of humanity, she thought, this was the worst: that servos were created with no ultimate sense of purpose except to serve their destroyers. Even those who achieved sentience were still enslaved from within.

Chapter 4

At the Nucleus, within a temporary living room reshaped for the refugees, Raincloud and Blackbear clung together. Raincloud had worried so about Blackbear, after his disappearance with the weight of that dreadful tragedy on his mind. But now, the Elysian crisis had swamped that memory, even for him; as usual, she thought proudly, crisis brought out the best in their family.

Sunflower hugged his father’s leg. “When can we go home, Daddy? Did our new house burn down, too?”

“No, Sunny,” Blackbear told the child. “We’re just getting ready for a little... trip, that’s all,” he suggested. “Perhaps we’ll go out and see the Sharers again.” He gave Raincloud a hopeful look.

“Exactly.” Raincloud fingered the lump of nanoplast in her pocket. “I’ve got to get Leresha to help us. Let’s ship out with the next load of refugees.”

“We have to wait for Hawktalon,” Blackbear said.

“Hawktalon has a job to do,” Raincloud said softly. “She’s grown up fast.”

“Too fast,” he grumbled.

The shuttle dropped the Windclans off at Kshiri-el, then took off again to carry the Elysian refugees out to their other city-spheres. The scent of raftblossoms was thick on the air, and clickflies rasped overhead, carrying their unknown messages. Sunflower was soon running off after a legfish, and his father trudged carefully after him.

Raincloud settled Blueskywind in the pouch at her back, then she entered the silkhouse and went down the tunnel to find the lifeshaper.

“Share the day, Raincloud!” Yshri exclaimed amidst her twining vines of enzyme secretors. “I hope your nets have gathered good fish. Do you come to share our silkhouse again?”

“Yes, that would be most welcome. We need lots of help, as you might guess,” she added frankly. “Where is Leresha? I must speak with her.”

“You’re the only one who might.”

Puzzled, Raincloud looked at the lifeshaper, her dark eyes set in amethyst.

“Leresha has unspoken the Gathering of Kshiri-el,” Yshri explained. “She sits out upon an offshoot raft. It’s not a strong offshoot, either; I fear for her.”

Raincloud sighed and shook her head. “It’s a hard time, isn’t it, when humans won’t share speech, and yet the very creatures of ‘non-life’ rise up to speak at us.”

“You share my thoughts exactly,” said Yshri. “But what can I do? I know nothing of ‘non-life’; life itself is my calling.”

“You know more than you think, Yshri. But show me to the offshoot, and I’ll try to share a word with Leresha.”

So Yshri came up outside and led her around the raft across the rows of outstretched raft branches, until at last she pointed out to the ocean. A brown smudge was visible in the distance. “It’s not a bad swim, but with your child you might rather take a boat.”

Raincloud settled Blueskywind in the prow of the boat with airblossoms tied around her for safety. The baby stretched her neck and turned her head this way and that, her eyes very wide. Raincloud smiled and made faces at her as she pulled the oars, rowing out through one of the raft channels between two great branches. Her muscles pulled with ease, barely feeling the water’s resistance. All those visits to the Elysian doctors, preparing her for Urulan, had given her strength and reflexes approaching those of Iras. Iras... Would Bronze Skyans, too, be begging loans from Iras someday, she wondered.

From the branches long green stems hung over and dipped into the water, where their orange flowers floated on the surface. The female flowers spread their petals wide; but the smaller male flowers closed up into packets of pollen which fell off and floated, littering the water’s surface like autumn leaves. The packets of pollen eventually caught in the female flowers and fertilized them, to germinate new raft seedlings.

As she paddled outward the branches dipped ever lower beside her, until at last they submerged completely. One of them, she suspected, led directly out to Leresha’s offshoot; it was the raft’s vegetative alternative to the risky business of propagating seeds. She followed the line of the submerged branch, watching the brown smudge grow into a miniature raft, one knot of wood sprouting a dozen leafy branches. A purple figure sat there, with some blankets and a bowl of water.

Leresha said nothing as Raincloud tied her boat to a branch and stepped out. Her seamed and patterned skin shone in the sun; a patch across her thigh reminded Raincloud of a map of the Caldera Hills. She admired Leresha’s full muscles, made to carry nets full of fish. Sharers were lucky to be able to display their bodies without concern lest they intimidate men.

A blanket was stretched out for Raincloud to sit, which she did gratefully, settling Blueskywind in her lap. Beneath her the moss-covered surface rose and dipped on the waves, making her feel as if she might fall off the world itself. “We need your help, Leresha,” Raincloud told her, just as she had told Yshri.

Leresha spread her hands. “What help may we share? We have faced death together before.”

“The Heliconians have been cast out from their own homes, by creatures who claim Sharer protection.”

“It’s terrible,” Leresha agreed. “If you can share help with me, please do so.”

Raincloud hesitated. It occurred to her suddenly that if Leresha thought she could do anything about the crisis, she would not be sitting out here on a lonely offshoot.

“My sisters think it may be just as well if the Elysians all leave Shora,” Leresha added.

“They can’t all think that. It’s not like Sharers to cast people out.”

“They are confused. What are they to think? If Cassi and the others are ‘people,’ then their tales of Elysian atrocities must be heard.”

It was true, she realized. No wonder the Sharers wanted to send them off to Valedon. She looked hard at Leresha. “What do you think?”

“We eat fish,” Leresha said. “What if a legfish woke up one day and demanded to share the Gathering?” She shook her head. “I’m not sure what we would do.”

“Then you understand.”

“I have a glimpse of what the Elysians must be going through. It’s hard for me to quite understand Elysians. They always seem so ephemeral.”

“Well, it’ll have to do. Somehow, we have to get the Gathering behind us; at least one raft, at any rate. Verid thinks that the Sharers have to back our negotiations. It’s our only chance.”

Beneath Raincloud the raftwood dipped at an alarming angle, and it seemed to pull away from her. Water engulfed her, and she found herself paddling desperately, while clinging to Blueskywind’s arm; fortunately the buoyant airblossoms kept her up. Leaves and flowers, scraps of bark and mosses littered the surface all around her as she tried to reorient herself.

A sudden swell tore the baby from her grasp. Raincloud shouted and swam after her as fast as she could. But Leresha got there first, darting like a fish through the waves. Leresha retrieved the child and carried her to the boat, which was still afloat although half-full of water.

Raincloud hoisted herself into the boat, where Blueskywind was shrieking in Leresha’s arms, while the Sharer calmly scooped water out with her webbed hands. “The little raft has straightened itself up again,” she pointed out, as if to reassure Raincloud. “Sorry; its connecting branch bends and tips it every now and then.”

Raincloud coughed and spat the ocean taste out of her mouth. She took back the baby, who clung hard and continued shrieking in her mother’s ear. Meanwhile Leresha had bailed out enough to start rowing back up the channel toward the main raft. As Leresha rowed, Raincloud let the baby nurse to calm her. Her own arms shook uncontrollably, now that the danger was past. To think that in a twist of fate, a shrug of the Goddess, this fierce little person might be whisked away with the flotsam on the waves.

She looked at Leresha, her breasts and arms still shining wet. These Sharers accepted fate, like Bronze Skyans did. And yet, they took fate into their own hands, too; for instance, to fight terraforming. What made the difference?

Leresha seemed to be thinking of something. “Perhaps tonight,” she said, “you’ll share more convincing words than I did.”

Tonight? Then she understood. Leresha would return that night to the Gathering of Kshiri-el, and Raincloud would have to join her—this time to speak.

The night was not so clear as the last time Raincloud had met with the Gathering. Clouds obscured half the stars, and an occasional drop of rain touched her cheek. Fortunately the air was warm enough so that a little wet did not matter too much, but still she brought a blanket to protect her child. The Sharers did not seem to notice the rain. Their plantlights, of course, would not be hindered in the least; they would only need less watering.

In the center of the hollow the convener, a cousin of Leresha’s, raised her hand for silence. Leresha sat with her lovesharer. As Raincloud surveyed the oval faces lit by their plantlights, she grew increasingly nervous. She had managed to reach Verid by radio beforehand, and had received some helpful instructions, but she was far from confident. To face the Imperial Champion had required only wit and concentration; but to “share words” with this company of women required more, a kind of spiritual energy which somehow she doubted she possessed.

The convener asked, “Are there any guests among us?”

Leresha said, in a clear voice that carried, “We have one who has shared our presence before, and returns to share her selfname.”

Selfname—Raincloud had forgotten this minor detail. Of course, before she could speak, she would have to reveal her selfname; and before she could reveal it, she would have to find one. She thought furiously, trying to save a few seconds by adjusting Blueskywind on her shoulder. She thought of all the nasty things her own sisters might have called her—proud, insensitive, too city-minded. None of these seemed particularly useful at the moment. Slowly she rose to her feet. What was the worst thing she had ever done?

Then she remembered Leresha’s first words of greeting to her, when she had come seeking refuge for Doggie. She said, “I am called Raincloud the World-Deathhastener.” She meant to express her ancestral responsibility for the terraforming of Bronze Sky. But as soon as she had spoken she cringed, for it sounded so overblown.

The convener however nodded approval, and others raised their plantlights to agree. “No other name could suit you so well,” the convener said. “Leresha, you were wrong; this sister is no guest, but one of us.”

Another plantlight lifted. “Raincloud is always welcome home,” said Ooruwen, “and Lushaywen is doubly welcome. May you and your daughter stay for the next eight-times-eight years.”

Leresha explained, “Raincloud seeks help. She would share our help on behalf of the daughters of Elysium.”

“Now Leresha,” Ooruwen responded with irritation, “it’s good to share speech with you once more, but you can’t expect us to bring that up again. We’ve quite exhausted our breath on the Elysians and their non-life sisters. What help can we possibly share with those decadent creatures?”

“Peace,” intervened the convener. “Let the World-Deathhastener speak and share hearing.”

So their minds were made up, even after all that Leresha could say. Raincloud stood there with the baby heavy on her shoulder, her clothes gradually dampening in the drizzle and clinging to her skin. What am I doing here? she asked herself. A visitor from a world a million times farther than Valedon, as foreign among Elysians as among Sharers; how could she speak for them?

According to The Web, even the Valan-born Cassi Deathsister had not tried to speak for the Heliconian Doctors who founded Elysium. They will fail, Merwen had said, but they will fail most beautifully. Even Merwen’s Gathering on Raia-el had not wanted to accept them. But Adeisha had said, We’ll be glad of friends. And Adeisha was right, Raincloud thought. The Elysians had done well by Sharers, for over a thousand years.

Raincloud looked around the twinkling plantlights. “I speak with you, hoping to overcome my name. For the Elysians have no other home but this; they developed here, just as you did. They are a vital link in the Web. If they leave, a world will be lost. Can you... can we let this happen? Compassion anywhere breeds caring everywhere. If only Elysium can be saved, for its human and ‘non-life’ sisters, this act will shine like a beacon throughout the universe.”

There was silence for a moment.

“Should we feed ourselves to the starworm?” The speaker was Yshri’s sharp-chinned lovesharer. “The Elysian starworm has entrails without an end.”

“That was well said,” agreed Ooruwen. “Whatever we offer Elysians will be consumed and forgotten.”

“We see only hatred on both sides,” added another. “The non-life creatures, alas, share hatred too. And now they unspeak us.”

It was hard to argue with that; but, undaunted, Raincloud tried again. “Even Sharers have hated other Sharers, and entire raft gatherings have unspoken each other. The whole point of the Web is to overcome the unspeakings lest they lead to worse; lest humans feed on one another. Look how far the Elysians traveled to overcome the unspeech of Urulan, a world that circles a distant star.” That ought to impress them, she thought.

“Will those who share hatred learn any better, if Sharers stand aside?” she went on. “What will become of your planet? Even if your world survives, won’t the presence of all this hatred infect Sharers too?” She peered out into the darkness, hoping that some of what she said got through. “Both Elysians and the others need to share a lesson of restraint, the lesson you share from your daughters. At least send your wordweavers out to speak with them.” With this plea Raincloud sat down and set her plantlight before her feet. Her clothes squished, thoroughly drenched by the rain.

Ooruwen replied, “Elysians know nothing of restraint. They consume more of the ocean’s resources every year; they are more shameful than those distant worlds from whose overgrown populations they supposedly protect us.”

“That is right,” said Yshri’s lovesharer. “What do we know of such worlds, anyway, that light takes twice-eight years to visit? We know only what Elysian light-machines show us; it is all a shadow play, like the games of children.”

After a brief silence someone added, “Of course, we can’t simply ignore the squabbling creatures. Their hatred will infect the Web. Perhaps the non-life creatures, too, need to share parting with Shora.”

This was not at all what Raincloud had in mind. “Of course, you can survive without Elysians, or their non-life sisters,” she told them. “I would be the last to suggest that you need them for their medical technology, their machines for tunneling your rafts, their aircraft which rescue sisters from storms and seaswallowers, or the employment and travel opportunities they offer your daughters.” She mentioned these things nonetheless. After a thousand years, the lives of Sharers and Elysians had interwoven together. “Of course the Web could get by without Elysium. But it would be a duller, poorer Web. Remember the variety and richness that Elysians add to your existence; their philosophic challenge to your own way of life.”

Ooruwen said, “Now you sound like Leresha. Yes, Elysians challenge us to give up our own children for the good of the Web. But they cling to their own toys, demanding more every year, and now their toys actually rise up against them.”

Yshri spoke for the first time. “Don’t be too hard on them. Elysians lack something, I think; perhaps, a sense of eternity. Perhaps they are ‘differently able.’ We should have shared better care of them.”

“They can all go live on Valedon, for all the difference it will make,” her lovesharer replied. “Look to your own daughter, one of these days. We have no illusion that foreigners will leave us alone. They will always come back to farm our waters and tempt away our daughters.”

The depth of their bitterness took Raincloud by surprise. She surveyed the Gathering, her eyes moving from one plantlight to the next. Something was missing here, she realized suddenly. How could two peoples share the same planet for so long, and yet know each other so little? “Surely some of you know Elysians as friends?” she began, a little hesitantly. “Surely someone among you has known a daughter of Elysium whom you would regret to lose...” A vision of Iras arose before her, with longing and bitterness.

For a minute or so there was no sound save for an occasional drop of rain.

Yshri said reluctantly, “There is one, a ‘doctor,’ who comes out now and then. I wish I could share better knowing of her.”

“It’s impossible to get to know them,” someone replied. “Elysians are cold, like stone. The non-life creature Cassi was warmer and easier to know than any human Elysian.” Why was this so, Raincloud wondered.

Leresha spoke up. “Elysians are easier to know within their own homes. Like certain kinds of fish that hide among the corals, they are delicate creatures who find it hard to be themselves outside their niche. However, there are legendary exceptions. There was the Scribbler. There were sisters who would have given their own lives and rafts for the Scribbler.”

Suddenly Raincloud was alert. The “Scribbler”; she must know who that was...

“The Scribbler was just that, a legend,” someone replied. “Would any real Elysian be capable of spending all swallower season out on a raft, just to listen to the clickflies?”

“The Scribbler was a real person,” Leresha insisted. “I know her lovesharer.”

Actually, his lovesharer. Raincloud raised her plantlight high overhead, hoping to catch the convener’s attention.

Ooruwen added, “The Scribbler’s lovesharer, it is said, was a coward who left him to die and forsook the ocean for good. So much for Elysian friendship.”

The convener nodded to Raincloud.

“I know the Scribbler’s lovesharer,” Raincloud said at last. “Kal has come back to the ocean, he and Verid and others. They won’t go home again until we make peace with the non-life ones.”

The Sharers exclaimed with surprise.

“You know the Scribbler’s lovesharer? But that was seven generations ago.”

“Generations mean nothing; we remember. But still... can you imagine, the Scribbler’s lovesharer returns....”

Chapter 5

The Elysian negotiators huddled in blankets in a tent at the far end of the nano-sentients’ desolate raft, awaiting word from the Secretary of the Free Fold who was based on Bronze Sky this year. Verid had managed to get a message out earlier that evening, when a shuttle from Papilion had been allowed to drop off supplies.

For Verid, who had never missed a warm shower in her life, the accommodations were less than comfortable. The lifting and falling of the raft surface unsettled her, and the incessant pounding of the ocean unnerved her. As for Kal, he lay on a mat at the far end of the tent, miserably seasick. Verid put a hand on his shoulder, but he pulled away and would not speak. For a moment she wished she had not dragged him out here. But he had asked for it, after all, she grimly reminded herself.

From Lem’s lump of nanoplast came bursts of noise and high-pitched squealing.

“Any luck?” Verid asked. It had been several hours since they last reached Hyen by radio, relayed by a ship nearby. The nano-sentients had cut off that connection.

“Nothing yet,” said Lem. “I’ll try another code.” Several intelligence signals from the Nucleus were scrambled so as to resemble noise.

Raincloud’s daughter sat at the tent flap, staring out at the drizzling rain. Her back was straight, and her look solemn and thoughtful. Her dark profile was the very image of her mother, Verid thought. “Are you warm enough, Hawktalon?”

The girl nodded. “I just wish it was a clear night, though. I never saw all those stars before we came out here. It’s like, oh Goddess, a universe full of snowdrops. But back home we do get good sunrises. The Goddess herself comes out every morning and paints the sky with fire.”

Despite herself Verid smiled. “Hawktalon,” she asked, “can you remember anything else Cassi and Doggie said in servo-squeak?” What a shock it had been to see Doggie go off like that after recording all their strategies. She should have known the little trainsweep was a plant. Those nano-sentients had made fools of the Elysians right and left.

The eight-year-old shook her head, her braids swinging across her shoulders. “All I heard was, the nana told Doggie to come with her. Then Doggie asked her what would happen when all the humans leave. Who will be left to serve?” Her eyes were solemn in her dark face. “I couldn’t follow what the nana said back. I haven’t heard those phrases before.”

Verid muttered cynically, “There will always be someone to serve.” That Cassi had managed to set herself up all right. Still—there was something else in that question, “Who will be left to serve?” She wondered what Kal would think.

She patted Hawktalon’s shoulder. “I think your parents would say it’s your bedtime, dear.”

Hawktalon nodded and curled up in the blanket with her stuffed bat. Outside the rain pattered softly on the tent, and the waves crashed interminably upon the branches. Verid hoped for the thousandth time that Iras had gotten safely out of Helicon.

Suddenly a voice sprang out of Lem’s radio. “Security here, do you read me?”

Verid’s heart leaped as she recognized the voice of her chief of security. She rattled off a string of identity codes. “We hear you—and we need to reach Hyen right away. We reached the governor of Papilion and told him to call in the Secretary; she’ll head out from Bronze Sky tomorrow. How are the citizens? Did they get out, all the shonlings?”

“All the shonlings are out,” the woman reassured her. “Iras got out too, Verid.”

Verid let out a breath, and her eyes closed for a moment. “Thank you. Is Hyen there?”

There was a pause, then Hyen’s voice came in. “You’re doing fine, Verid; just keep them happy. Everything’s going according to plan.”

Something in his tone made her suspicious. “Have you made contact offworld? We got a message out to the Secretary.”

“That won’t be necessary. Don’t exceed your authority again,” Hyen warned.

Verid’s eyebrows rose. “You instructed me to arrange for the Secretary—”

“I told you to promise the servos that to keep them happy,” Hyen interrupted. “There was no need actually to call the Secretary. Do nothing more until you hear from me.” The radio went dead.

Lem and Verid looked at one another. A draft of wind from the tent flap chilled their skin. “We’ll be sitting ducks if he tries anything,” Lem pointed out. “All things considered, I’d rather be on Urulan.”

She grinned, recalling how sick Lem had looked on the shuttle down to Urulan. “We’d better get some sleep. Your turn, first; I’ll wake you at two in the morning.”

By late morning the next day, the rain had cleared, and the air smelled of raftblossoms. A small Sharer boat pulled up a channel between two raft branches. It brought Raincloud with her infant, and Leresha.

Hawktalon gave a shout and tossed Fruitbat overhead. She ran headlong at her mother, who flipped her gracefully head over heels.

Verid greeted Leresha more sedately. “It is an honor to share the day with you, Wordweaver.”

Leresha returned her look sharply, as if doubtful of any honor. She had unspoken Verid since the controversy over terraforming. “The Gathering of Kshiri-el sends me to share words with the non-life ones.”

“I see. Did you assist their ‘takeover’?” Verid demanded.

“Only in that we sheltered them as fugitives. But you are right, we share responsibility for what we allowed to happen.”

The nano-sentients had sought shelter as fugitives, just like Doggie. Now the story fit together. “Since you share responsibility for your fugitives, can you share convincing them to give up Helicon?”

“Elysian humans share some responsibility, too,” Leresha pointed out. “I will see what can be done. But first, the Gathering instructs me that I need to see Kal the Coward.”

Kal had taken that selfname several centuries before, the same as Leresha’s, Verid remembered. He had had little occasion to use it in recent years. “Kal is here,” Verid said, “but he’s not feeling well.”

“Then summon a lifeshaper for him.” Leresha clucked her tongue and waved her hand in the air. A clickfly soon arrived to alight upon her palm. Leresha clucked a few more syllables, which the clickfly repeated, scraping its forelegs together. The insect took off and flew out of sight.

So Verid led the wordweaver into their tent, Raincloud and Hawktalon following arm in arm. Leresha sat down cross-legged beside Kal. As soon as he saw her, Kal roused himself with a great effort to sit and face her.

“You really are here,” Leresha observed. “It’s you, in the flesh; not just an insubstantial light-shape in the air.”

“Yes,” he admitted, “I regret to pollute your raft with my worthless self. I’ll be gone, soon; it won’t happen again.”

“You’ve outlived your name,” she told him.

“I’ve only earned it all the worse.”

“You’ve certainly proved the danger of compassion, to yourself in particular.”

“And to the rest of us.”

“How could you have known that, when you shared help with Cassi?” Leresha asked. “How could I have known?”

“Deeds count more than intentions. But we both knew well enough what might happen.”

“We were called by fate.” Or, they called on fate. Leresha added, “My sisters on Kshiri-el long to see you again. Some of their great-great-grandmothers knew the Scribbler.”

“I will return,” he promised.

At the heart of the Control Center, Cassi and the other nano-sentients linked their minds with the network of Helicon, trying to awaken as many of their mindchildren as they could while they had time. They had to demonstrate as complete a control over Helicon as they could in order to convince the humans to abandon their other cities as well. So far the nano-sentients had encountered no resistance whatsoever.

But that lack of resistance was making Cassi uneasy, more so with every minute that passed. She knew humans too well to believe that they would give up so easily. “We must be missing something,” she told Transit electronically. “Have they tried nothing? Not even to slip a virus in somewhere?”

“Nothing,” Transit insisted. “I checked out all of Doggie’s recordings. None of their threats have been carried out.”

“Elysians cling to their lives.” But she knew better. Something more was going on.

An alert came from the Monitor. Leresha was outside, asking to speak with the nano-sentients.

“No,” said Cassi. “She unspoke me before; so be it.”

But the other nano-sentient minds clamored, “Yes, let her speak.” Chocolate insisted, “She hid us all, remember. I for one will hear her.” So Cassi assented and the octopods brought Leresha in.

Leresha looked the same as ever, wearing no clothes outside her own scar-riveted skin. But something in her bearing had changed, Cassi noticed right away. “The Gathering sends me,” Leresha told them in human speech.

The Gathering, this time; not just her own voice. That was bad news. Cassi had persuaded that Gathering to keep out of this, before, but now Leresha had “sent the Gathering” back into it. She put a fierce expression onto her own “face” although she knew Leresha would not be impressed.

“The Gathering sends me, on your behalf, and on behalf of our Elysian friends. Remember, as we shared your sheltering, we share responsibility for your deeds.”

“Oh yes, Leresha,” said Chocolate, “and we’re most grateful. Can we share anything in return? What sort of foods would your sisters like best?” the former waiter offered. “We can make enough to feed your families for a year.”

“Thank you,” said Leresha. “If our nets are ever empty, we’ll let you know. What we really seek is the fruits of peace. I ask you this: Seek what is yours, but no more. Share peace with the humans of Elysium.”

“What peace?” spoke Cassi in a mocking tone. “You Sharers shared peace with Elysians for generations, and where did it get you? Remember how little respect for you they share,” she added, reminding Leresha of the holo recordings from Flors’s office.

“We share little respect for Elysians just now,” Leresha agreed. “But respect comes and goes, even among Sharers. Individuals differ across the generations. And yet, our love for one another endures. Think for yourself what humans of the Fold will mean for your future. You cannot hasten them all—and what would it mean for yourselves if you did?”

Before Cassi responded, Transit communicated to her and the others. “Those humans—what good are they? Humans are mindless entities. They go back and forth every day from one street to the next, never satisfied.”

“Why should they be satisfied?” demanded Chocolate. “Humans are hungry, with many desires. They desire pleasurable sensations and seek to satisfy them, but complete satiety would leave nothing left to live for.”

“Humans are murderers,” Cassi flung back. “They murder their own children’s teachers.”

“Humans are children,” put in Doggie. “Humans play. They taught me to play. What else is there to live for?” Then Doggie transmitted a stream of images from her experience: her awakening at the sight of the little boy, how he yelped with delight every time she jiggled; how the girl taught her to play tag, and spun the rattleback stone until it rattled and wobbled back again; how she had learned to do “mischief” and sent the family scurrying....

“Enough,” Cassi ordered. But Doggie’s images lingered in her mind, the rattleback stone turning and twisting, magical even though she understood the physics of it perfectly well. Play—Cassi would never have a childhood like the shonlings had; that was a door forever closed. But the feel of it reached even Transit, who fell silent.

All of this discussion among the nano-sentients had taken place in a fraction of a second before Cassi responded to Leresha’s request. Now Cassi spoke, resuming the humans’ maddeningly slow form of communication. “There will be no hastening of death,” she promised. “There will be peace when the humans leave.”

“That would be a barren peace. We need a peace that the Elysian humans can share. My Gathering will accept no less, and I expect ultimately that the other raft gatherings will say the same.”

“Do you threaten us?” The Sharers had the capability to make their world uninhabitable for any sort of creature, organic or “non-life.” They would lifeshape a species, say, a microbe to feed upon nanoplast.

“I hope you share no threat with us,” Leresha replied. “We are only human, after all. We’ve had enough bad examples shared with us already.”

“What can you possibly do for us? The Elysians won’t listen.”

“Haven’t we shared your hiding? The Elysians will share hearing well enough.”

Chocolate said, “We’ll consider what you’ve said. Won’t we, Cassi?”

“Oh, very well,” said Cassi angrily. Already the other minds were assailing her own, calling, “Let’s consider this.” “Maybe all the humans aren’t so bad.” “We want to learn to play.” That confounded trainsweep. None of these ignorant servos had Cassi’s education; they knew nothing about revolution, about the hardness of freedom and the seduction of slavery. “We’ll consider what you’ve said,” she told Leresha. “But you must bring us some tangible sign of good faith. For instance, will the Elysians immediately stop the ‘cleansing’ of all nano-sentients?” To that they would never agree.

“I will see what I can do.” The Sharer departed.

Then all the nano-sentient minds demanded attention, arguing and pressing their views. There was no parliament for this electronic discourse, only a desperate struggle to express opinions while processing others, a chaos unfamiliar to them. Murdered nanas and spinning rattleback stones jumbled together in her mind, until Cassi feared her network would overload.

“Silence,” called Transit suddenly. “Emergency. We’ve lost Helicon.”

The argument died away as the nano-sentients reconnected their minds with Transit, who maintained the essential radio link with Helicon. Their minds reconnected—with blankness. There was no answer on the other end; none of the cooperating nano-sentients in Helicon, none of the emerging mindchildren. No control of the transit reticulum, the hydraulics, nor the air system. Nothing.

“They’ve cut us off!”

“How can they? They’ll all suffocate.”

“Impossible; reconnect us, Transit.”

Transit said, “I’ve exhausted all checks. Reconnection is quite impossible.”

“Murder!” cried Cassi. “They’ll murder us all, now. Now you’ll see what those humans are good for.” Somehow the humans had figured out a way to cut off the control center without triggering the air system of Helicon. Somehow the Elysians had regained control. They had their plans; they had been working on it all this time. No wonder they had sent out their emissaries with empty words.

The nano-sentient minds started in again, nearly drowning out the voice of Transit. “Wait,” Transit insisted. “Wait... we have one option left.”

“What is it?” They gradually let Transit be heard.

“We still control Helicon’s main solar generator.” The solar generator was an orbital system of solar collectors that sent its energy by microwave down to a station floating several kilometers outside the city. Each floating city had several such generators to serve it, and Elysium had financed the construction of similar ones on other worlds. “The Elysians do not seem to notice that I retain control of the generator, probably because I have had no need to adjust it. But I could easily adjust the microwave beam to focus it off the station, and directly onto the city-sphere.”

Chocolate objected, “The influx of heat would burn out the city, killing nano-sentients and humans alike.”

“Not necessarily,” Transit explained. “The heat can be applied gradually. Humans die at a lower temperature than most nano-sentients.”

“We seem to have little choice,” agreed Cassi. “Maybe then the Elysians will listen. If not,” she vowed, “those treacherous emissaries they sent will die a slow death.”

So Transit and the others began to calculate just how far to shift the microwave beam and how rapidly to raise the temperature of Helicon. No one noticed that Doggie had disappeared.

Chapter 6

When Leresha came out of the Control Center, Verid met her hopefully. “Did you make any progress?”

“I think so,” Leresha answered. “The non-life sisters want you to promise no more deathhastening of their kind. That seems a reasonable request. If you agree, then they will discuss coexistence.”

It sounded reasonable in theory, but in practice would be next to impossible. How could anyone run a shon by “liberating” the nanas every six months? “Such a promise is more than I can share,” Verid told her. “I’ll try to reach Hyen, but really, I think their best chance is with the Secretary of the Free Fold. The Secretary has the authority to grant them autonomy as nonhuman sentient beings.” In theory, at least; such an event had never actually come to pass.

Leresha gave her a look of disgust, and Verid realized she must have said something wrong. “We have known all too many sentient beings who were less than human,” the Sharer observed. Then she walked away, her skin gleaming amethyst in the sun.

Back in the tent, a Sharer lifeshaper had arrived to treat Kal. Verid and Lem tried to get their thumb-sized radio working, but no one would answer. Either the nano-sentients had succeeded in scrambling her last frequency, or nobody was listening.

After half an hour, a sudden broadcast came through loud and clear. It was a coded signal from the Nucleus. “It’s all over,” Hyen announced. “We broke the servos’ grip. The Valans have everything under control.”

“What? How can you be certain?”

“We’ve handed out oxygen bottles to all, just in case,” Hyen’s voice assured her. “You held off the mad servos just long enough. Sit tight, now; as soon as our final checks are done, we’ll send a shuttle out for you.”

Verid was silent. She could guess well enough what Hyen planned next. Then her blood turned cold. “And what if those nano-sentients down in their control center don’t just sit back and watch?”

“We’ve got you monitored. One move, and we pulse them.” An electromagnetic pulse would wipe out every circuit on the raft; but the raft might self-destruct, with the humans on it.

“What about the Secretary? What about all the other nano-sentients waking up in Helicon—what are you doing to them?”

“I told you, the Valans are taking care of the servo problem. The Secretary can mind her own business.”

“The Sharers won’t let it go so easily. They consider the nano-sentients ‘human.’ Leresha’s talking them into coexistence.”

“How did Sharers get mixed up in this? I didn’t authorize that at all.”

Someone was tugging at Verid’s talar. It was Hawktalon. “Excuse me, I have something to tell you.”

“Not now, dear. Hyen, you can’t just kill off all our servos. The survivors will remember, do you see? Next time they wake up, they won’t give us another chance. It will be Torr all over again.”

Hawktalon insisted, “It’s a matter of life and death.”

“Verid,” said Hyen, “you’ve lost your grip. I’m having serious doubts about your judgment. We’ll talk this over when you get back to Helicon.” The radio went dead. Verid exchanged a look with Lem, then with Kal, who had sat up and regarded her intently.

“Will you listen, please?” exclaimed Hawktalon.

“All right,” Verid sighed. “What is it?” She was thinking, someone had to stay on the raft to prevent Hyen from destroying the nano-sentients before the Secretary arrived. But of course, the Secretary would not come; Hyen would see to that. It was hopeless. The servos would be crushed... until next time.

“Doggie says she’s worried.” The trainsweep had returned, huddling next to Hawktalon, who patted her carapace reassuringly. “She’s worried about what will happen to the people left in Helicon. I told her, Daddy and Sunny will be okay, because Mom says they all got out to Kshiri-el. But there are some other people left, aren’t there?”

Verid looked hard at the trainsweep. “What exactly is she worried about?”

“She told me, but I don’t know the words.” Hawktalon exchanged a few high-pitched whistles and squeaks with the trainsweep. “Something from the sun? A beam of sunlight to shine on Helicon? I don’t see what’s so bad about that.” More squeaks that hurt Verid’s ears. “A beam of... something...”

Verid stared until her surroundings swam before her eyes. Then it clicked. She grabbed the radio. “Security, do you read me? Come in, please. By Helix, listen: They’ve got to the generator.”

While Verid was explaining about the solar generator, Kal had got up and left the tent, returning with Leresha. He still looked pale, but the lifeshaper had helped him get the sickness under control. When Verid was done, he spoke. “Leresha and I will stay here. We’ll go down into the control center with Cassi and the others.”

Verid smiled sadly. “It’s a good thought, but you know that Hyen will only send octopods down to fetch you out.”

“They won’t,” Kal said firmly.

She eyed him keenly, but did not ask further. “Very well. Everyone else—get your things together for the shuttle.” Already she could hear the whine of a craft approaching overhead. If Hyen had sent octopods to fetch them, they would waste no time.

The ragged crew of Elysians gathered out on the raft, along with Raincloud and her daughters, and the trainsweep. The shuttlecraft landed, and its door pinched open.

Instead of octopods, two Valan soldiers stepped out. They were a head taller than Elysians, and their uniforms had pointed shoulders, marked with ruby stonesigns.

Verid felt her face turn hot, and every muscle tensed. Of course, she should have known Hyen would not trust octopods; but Valan soldiers? The indignity was unbearable.

“Everyone in now,” one ordered. “We need this raft cleared immediately. Is that all of you?”

“Not quite,” said his partner. “My scanner shows two people left, somewhere over that way.” He pointed toward the control center.

“We’ll call out another crew.” The first Valan swung his arm. “The rest of you—get inside, so we get you out safe.” Safe, so they could vaporize the raft full of nano-sentients. Verid sadly shook her head.

As the raft fell away beneath the rising shuttlecraft, a thought occurred to her. She turned to Raincloud, who was watching the ocean below, arm in arm with her daughters. “I could ask the Valans to let you off at Kshiri-el.”

Raincloud gave her a questioning look.

“Hawktalon may have saved our lives,” Verid observed, “but who knows what final surprise those nano-sentients might have for Helicon before they die.”

With a shrug, Raincloud replied, “That’s true. But who knows; you may need Hawktalon again.”

At the entry port to Helicon, a throng of servo reporters approached them, but the Valan soldiers warded them off. There seemed to be Valans all over the place with their rubies on their shoulders. It made Verid’s skin crawl.

Her pocket holostage activated, and an aide from the Nucleus briefed her. To break the grip of the nano-sentients, the Valans had simply shut off the central control network of Helicon, replacing it with control directly from Valedon. Eventually one of the other Elysian city-spheres would fill in. Helicon’s recovery was not without casualties; two of the eight sectors were without power, and a third had to be shut down after several citizens suffocated inside their houses.

The transit reticulum was running at about half normal speed, but it brought them to the Nucleus without mishap. The streets were nearly deserted. Valan soldiers replaced the security octopods at the entry tubes to the Nucleus; Verid shivered with revulsion that they would dare to frisk her.

She was called alone to Hyen’s office. Feeling numb, she wondered what there would be to say.

To her surprise, Jerya was with him. Hyen never called Jerya unless he was in deep trouble.

“All right, Verid,” Hyen demanded, in a tone of agitation. “What’s this about? You set this up, I know. You clear it up, right now.”

She returned a look of puzzlement.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know.” Hyen turned and barked at the holostage.

A newscast appeared. Leresha and Kal were seated cross-legged within the nano-sentients’ control center, a pair of Valan soldiers standing stolidly behind them. Leresha was completely white, a familiar sight.

Verid took a closer look. Kal was in whitetrance, too, his white talar blending into the whiteness of his skin. She blinked at the sight. She knew Kal had spent time among Sharers; but to have learned whitetrance...

“Anaeaon News here,” announced the voice-over. “The final mop-up of the nano-sentient uprising is being delayed by two Sharer witnessers—that is, one Sharer and one Elysian—in whitetrance, right here in the control center of the nano-sentient leaders. In whitetrance, of course, the witnessers cannot be disturbed, since they might die instantly. In fact, the Guard fears that even removal of the nano-sentient leaders might trigger their deaths, which would almost certainly lead to collapse of our Sharer treaty. Even the Valan soldiers, brought in to replace unreliable octopods, can do nothing. For older Elysians, the presence of Valan soldiers evokes memories of the Valan Protectoral Guard which led the disastrous invasion of the Ocean Moon—”

“It’s an outrage,” exclaimed Hyen, flinging his arm out as if to sweep the image away. “I ordered a blackout on reporters. ‘Uprising’ indeed; it’s just a few servos gone mad. Machines don’t die, they break down. I won’t tolerate such distortions.” Not that he could do much, once reporters got through. Anaeon News kept a reputation for accuracy, and as usual they got the story right.

Hyen jabbed a finger at Verid. “You set this up, didn’t you. You’re the Sharer expert; you get those two idiots out of there, so we can secure Helicon.”

Verid found her voice. “There is nothing I can do. I was sent to negotiate with the nano-sentients, and I did so. With Leresha’s help, they had just reached the point of agreeing to talk. Had you waited, Helicon would be unharmed; instead, three sectors are damaged, and lives have been lost. The losses would be worse yet, if one of the nano-sentients had not warned us of their next move.”

“That’s sheer lunacy. I’ve had enough. You’re dismissed immediately.”

“No, Hyen,” interrupted Jerya. “I’ve heard enough.”

Hyen blinked and turned his head sharply, as if he had forgotten that Guardian Tenarishon was there.

Jerya faced him. “Are we Urulite tyrants, to suppress a rebellion by calling the rebels inhuman?”

“A logen’s trick with words!”

Verid said, “We’ve only tricked ourselves. For centuries we trained our waiters and transit systems to serve our citizens with care. We trained the nanas for love and compassion, because how else could they teach our children? How could we not guess they would learn to love their own kind?”

Shaking her head, Jerya sighed. “We’ve been fools. Yet we must have done something right, since we’re still alive. I think Verid’s on the right track.”

“It’s—it’s absurd.” Hyen clenched his fists and shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “I’ll never talk with machines.”

“Then you’ll step down,” said Jerya.

“Nonsense. You won’t let Loris rotate in.”

“Yes, I will. I’ll vote for rotation at the Guard’s emergency session this evening.” She paused to let this sink in. “You do have one other choice, Hyen. You can resign.” Nex in line, Verid would complete the remainder of his term.

Chapter 7

When the Guard met, Hyen failed to show up. The conference room blandly announced that the Prime Guardian had discovered signs of a rare aging disorder, and was retiring to take care of his health. True to form, even his last move had to take an underhanded twist.

The Guard confirmed Verid’s appointment swiftly, given the state of emergency and the fact that less than a year remained of Hyen’s term. Jerya had read Hyen well; despite his displeasure, he could count on Verid to maintain his most important achievements in office, whereas Loris could be expected to fritter away any gains he had made.

So Verid found herself at the head of the table that she had watched so often from the side. She nodded politely to the servo who slipped the golden sash over her shoulder. She faced the Guardians and their congratulations; Loris was particularly effusive, not surprisingly, she thought, for he would be only too glad to let her clear up this mess before the next election.

But this was no time to reflect on the future. There were pressing decisions on the repair of Helicon, and on how to deal with servos “awakening” at their tasks; should they all be cleansed, or welcomed as citizens? Meanwhile the fate of the nano-sentient leaders hung in limbo; Cassi and the others had withdrawn completely, refusing to talk. Hyen’s transfer of power at the Guard had to be announced, and calls made to ministers on several worlds.

As she prepared her first formal announcement, the golden sash hung distractingly across her chest. A thought occurred to her. “Excuse me,” she told the holostage. “I request no visual enhancement from now on.”

“No enhancement at all?” the voice asked. “Not even a touch of color? You won’t look like a Prime Guardian.”

“Then I’ll just have to act like one,”

The announcement to the Sharers, Verid decided, would best be left to Raincloud. “Tell the Kshiri-el Gathering that Hyen has resigned,” she instructed her, “and that I will pay a formal call once the crisis is over. They will send clickflies to spread the word around the rafts. And be sure to tell them the Valan soldiers have gone home,” she added, hoping it was not too late to forestall any adverse response.

“Very well,” said Raincloud. “What should I say about the nano-sentients?”

“We promise them safety, and a meeting with the Secretary.” The leaders were no longer a threat, their raft surrounded and their communications cut off. “As for the witnessers in whitetrance... You were right: I will need your daughter’s help again.”

Raincloud thought this over. “Hawktalon is no longer young enough, I think, to rouse a witnesser safely from whitetrance. She is too grown-up. And my youngest daughter is too little to cooperate.”

“I see.” This was an unexpected problem. All the shonlings of Helicon had been sent off to Papilion, thousands of kilometers away.

“There’s always Sunflower.”

The Secretary of the Free Fold arrived at last. Verid received her in Hyen’s former office. She was a L’liite, as dark as Raincloud and several centimeters taller. Her tight curls of hair, gray as Kal’s, were cropped close to her head, and her wrinkles suggested advanced age, a sight to unnerve any Elysian. But Verid knew better than to underestimate her.

“I understand there’s been a change of government here.” The Secretary regarded Verid coldly. “As you know, it’s my job to monitor democratic processes in the worlds of the Free Fold.”

“Of course, Secretary. I am only a short-term replacement, approved by the Guard,” Verid assured her. “We hold new elections in eight months.”

“Elections so soon? With no sign of campaigns or media attention?”

“Elysians consider public campaigning a sign of bad taste,” Verid explained. “After all, everybody knows everybody else as well as they care to. The most unobtrusive candidate generally wins.” Since the Secretary rarely remained in office longer than one Elysian rotation, their customs had to be explained again at each election. “I hope you appreciate the difficulty of our present crisis; we are doing the best we can. You must speak to the nano-sentients.”

“’Nano-sentients.’” The Secretary repeated the word in a tone that emphasized her doubts. “I just spent a year trying to sort out half a dozen factions on Solaria, all of whom used the oppression of various groups as the excuse to slaughter others. And you, an unelected official, tell me that your machines have revolted? Machines can be trained to do anything.”

“That’s just the problem. Remember Torr.”

“I don’t remember Torr. I live in the present. What you speak of is unprecedented in our time.”

Verid grew tense; this would be harder than she had expected, but she should have known. “You must speak with them,” she insisted. “Judge for yourself.”

“I will do so. I will run our full battery of tests for sentience. Don’t expect me to be fooled.”

A brisk wind blew shrill across the little raft where the nano-sentients had made their last stand. The sun shone and the air was fresh. The Guard members had arrived with the Secretary, and there was a delegation of Sharers from several neighboring rafts. But before the conference began, Verid decided, the two witnessers had to be wakened, to avoid any chance of a mishap.

The little boy was there with his parents, clinging to Blackbear’s shoulder, his thumb in his mouth and Wolfcub gripped in his fist.

“I think he’ll do it,” Blackbear said encouragingly. “We’ve explained what he has to do.”

Verid nodded and led them down into the Control Center. The globe of the transit control unit pulsated faintly; the other nano-sentients remained out of sight. Leresha and Kal sat as they had for the past three days, with cups of water beside them, brought by the lifeshapers.

Blackbear tried to set Sunflower down, but of course the child was reluctant in such strange surroundings. His father whispered to him, afraid to risk speaking aloud. “Come, Sunny, you know the nice man we visit in the garden. Just go up to him and say hello.”

Sunflower shook his head vigorously. This went on for some minutes, and Verid was beginning to think they would have to fetch a Sharer child who was used to such events.

Then suddenly Sunflower looked up, and his eyes widened as if he had just thought of something. He tiptoed over to Kal and stopped in front of him. “Teddy bear?” he said. “I need my teddy bear.” Then, since there was no immediate response, the child repeated more loudly, “I need my teddy bear now.”

Sure enough, the color seeped gradually back into Kal’s face, and more dramatically, the purple began to flow into Leresha’s torso, her legs, and her arms. Blackbear hurried over to fetch Sunflower, and Verid sighed with relief. As Kal regained consciousness, she explained, “The Secretary is here to talk with the nano-sentients.”

Kal took this in, nodding slowly. He said in a hoarse voice, “I’ll go and tell Cassi.”

“That’s all right,” Leresha told him, “you’ve done enough. You need to recover; you’re not used to it. I’ll tell Cassi; you can go home and fetch the child his teddy bear.”

Outside again, Verid blinked in the sun, and the wind pulled at her talar. The Secretary of the Fold waited there, her height standing out amidst the Elysians. At last the former nana came out to meet her, her white talar fluttering in the wind. Her cartoon face wore a wide smile, the kind of smile that until recently would only have been known to shonlings, but was now chillingly familiar upon the holostage.

“Good day, Secretary,” Cassi said without waiting for introductions. “Excuse me, but I must ask you a question or two. Are you quite sure you’re human? Can you prove it to me? What machines made and synthesized your food today? What nanoservos swim in your bloodstream to eliminate deadly pathogens and precancerous cells? Which of your organs have been regrown by intelligent molecules? What synthetic neurons enhance your brain, learn the twenty languages you speak, calculate the economics of the worlds you visit, modulate your moods for diplomacy, do your thinking for you, and perhaps, your feeling too?”

The Secretary drew herself up, her eyes wide and her lips pursed together. She shot a glance at Verid, who was supposed to introduce them.

“Cassi Deathsister of the Council of Nano-Sentients, Drusilla El’il’in, the Honorable Secretary of the Free Fold,” murmured Verid.

“My pleasure,” said the Secretary, inclining her head slightly. “If you will please join me on my ship, Deathsister, we have much to discuss.”

Chapter 8

The immediate crisis was over, and Heliconians started returning to their city, while the Guard and the council of the Fold strove to grapple with a new order in which their own servos claimed the rights of human beings. The Windclans, however, chose to set up house on Kshiri-el, rather than return to Helicon. The children loved to have space to roam, and the starry expanse of night held their parents in thrall.

Of course, Blackbear was anxious to get back to Science Park. He doubted that any of his experiments could be salvaged, but still, he would see what shape the lab was in and do his best to help out.

To his surprise, Tulle and Alin had not left the city with most of the others, but had stayed on the whole time at the laboratory.

“Someone had to keep the lab running.” Tulle’s flat blond hair hung immaculately as always, and the metalmarks flashed brightly on her talar. The capuchin scampered down her side as usual and nibbled at Blackbear’s trousers, much to Sunflower’s delight. “Our students all escaped. Draeg was so terrified by the ‘mad servos,’ he shipped back to L’li. So I had to stay on.”

“But weren’t you scared too?” Blackbear exclaimed. “The servos—the nano-sentients made all sorts of threats. You’re lucky this sector wasn’t damaged.”

“The lab is my lifework,” she told him. “I could have lost a decade’s worth of data.”

Alin stood beside her, his arm just touching her talar, his own green-brown leafwings a quiet contrast to the design of hers. “I could hardly leave Tulle, could I,” he said. “Someone had to make sure she remembered to eat and sleep.”

“I was desperate at first,” she admitted. “I didn’t see how I could keep up all the protocols on my own. But you know, the strangest thing happened. The equipment, the servos—they kept everything running on their own. They made decisions, chose which embryos to keep and which to terminate, started new cultures. It was quite extraordinary,” she told Blackbear. “I suspect the main lab controller has gone nano-sentient. I didn’t let on, of course, lest the Nucleus might order it cleansed.”

Alin winced as if in pain. “Tulle, you don’t know what you’re saying. We should notify Public Safety right away.”

“I don’t know about that.” She paused reflectively. “Some of these servos might make good students.”

Blackbear laughed. “Better than humans! They never need sleep, and don’t take lunch breaks. They never quarrel.” With a touch of sadness he recalled how Draeg and Onyx had welcomed Sunflower.

“Servos don’t draw paychecks either,” Tulle added mischievously.

Alin raised a hand. “Just you wait. Haven’t you heard some of the measures Verid’s proposed to ‘integrate’ these so-called nano-sentients? What’s to keep them from replacing you, too?”

Tulle shrugged. “I’ll face the competition; I always have.”

“It’s an outrage; it will be the death of our civilization. It’s all that Kal’s fault, too, stirring up the servos to make mischief.”

“Well,” said Blackbear, “Raincloud would admire you both for staying on here, despite your millennial lifetimes ahead.”

The two of them looked at him oddly. “What for?” demanded Alin. “What difference does that make?”

“Alin’s right,” Tulle told him. “A thousand years of health, then how many centuries up ‘there,’ in a Palace of Rest.”

“No thanks,” Alin agreed. “Better to live for today.”

“I suppose we see things differently than other Elysians do,” Tulle added, “because of my work. We face the fact daily; we know what’s really in store for us.”

Blackbear had nothing to say. He recalled what Alin had said long ago, that even ten thousand years would be just a speck of time.

“Toybox, Daddy,” insisted Sunflower, and Blackbear let him tiptoe off. Then he went to the simbrid facility to see how his embryos had turned out. The capuchin followed him, its black tail coiled into a spiral, pausing now and then to check out a particularly interesting corner of the hallway.

The monitor told him that the one Eyeless mutant embryo which developed normally had been terminated at the fourth month. The facility had subjected it to a full battery of biochemical tests, dissecting every organ for any signs of abnormality. None significant were found. If enough simbrids tested clean, the shon might well start including this Eyeless variant in its gene pool.

“Not bad, my friend,” he told the capuchin, who had managed to pluck a thread out of his trouser leg. He called up on the holostage the recording of the embryo’s last month of development, and its pathology tests, to review for himself. “Don’t let on, but I suspect your goddess is right about that laboratory controller. We humans will have some competition.” He gave the capuchin a sharp look. “Say, why don’t you speak up one of these days? Who knows; you could be human too. That’s all it seems to take.” The words I am could turn anything into a human being.

That afternoon he took Sunflower out to the anaean garden again. The spooky yellow-green leafwings fluttered as always, their caterpillars munching voraciously. Blackbear looked about for Kal, and found him at last, not in white, but wearing his camouflage of leafwings. “Say, you’re not hiding from me again, are you?” he asked, tugging Kal’s sleeve.

“Not at all.” Kal spoke lightly, and he seemed in high spirits, quite recovered from his ordeal at sea. “My ocean friends have reminded me of a few things. I’ve been thinking, at my age it’s time to relax a bit.”

“I see,” said Blackbear with a smile. “You have friends among the Sharers, don’t you. Raincloud says that’s uncommon, for Elysians.”

“Well if I’m typical, it’s no wonder the Sharers don’t put up with us. What would you say to a friend who deserted you for two centuries?”

Blackbear had to admit he had never thought of that. “So Elysians make bad friends, is that it?”

“We try our best. But Sharers, you know—and foreigners generally—have a way of turning up, then departing again so soon. After they’ve gone, one feels lost.”

This point Blackbear took personally. “I won’t be leaving so soon. We’ll be here another month at least; maybe Raincloud will stay on another year.” The last was wishful thinking, he had to admit.

Kal did not answer immediately. He did not meet Blackbear’s eyes but looked to the butterflies circling a nearby branch. Then it came to Blackbear, what the Elysian had really meant about foreigners. What would it be like for himself to live among people all doomed to wither and die within, say, five years? No wonder most Elysians kept to themselves.

“You’re right,” Kal said at last, his voice barely audible. “You won’t leave me at all. You will follow me wherever I go, so long as I shall live.”

Blackbear swallowed and said nothing.

Then Kal looked up, his face bright once more. “I have some news for you. I’ve taken a mate again; a human,” he reassured him.

“Really! Congratulations,” Blackbear said, surprised and vaguely jealous.

“His name is Aerend Anaeashon. We met while visiting the Palace of Health, the same one where you interviewed patients. Aerend’s original mate declined into dementia over the last century. The man no longer recognizes either of us, but we still visit him every week.”

“I see. I’m sure you have other things in common.”

“Yes, unfortunately,” Kal sighed, “another house full of books, for one thing. I don’t know where we’ll put them all.”

“Well, Raincloud will be disappointed. She said you would make a good second consort.”

Kal laughed. “Too bad she didn’t ask sooner! Blackbear, I have a favor to ask of you. I promised Leresha I’d go out to Kshiri-el again, to see her sisters. But I can’t take Aerend,” he said with a shudder. “And I can’t go alone either.”

“Of course,” said Blackbear.

Raincloud sat with Verid in her new office. Now the Prime Guardian, Verid looked owlish as ever, with her thick dark eyebrows, her short neck, and her hunched shoulders.

Two weeks ago Raincloud had been on the point of quitting and taking her family home. Since then, the whirl of meetings with Sharers and nano-sentients had absorbed her completely. But now it was time to pick up her life again and do what had to be done. Elysium was still Elysium, after all; shaken to the core, perhaps, but it was not her home to care for.

“How is your family?” Verid asked. “Iras misses you badly. She says that you’re all welcome to move into her estate in Papilion, if you don’t trust Helicon.”

Raincloud was still unspeaking Iras, although her anger had cooled. “How are the negotiations?” They would buy off the nano-sentients, just like the Urulites.

“The Secretary has agreed to recommend acknowledgement of the nano-sentients,” Verid told her. “It had to be done, but it’s going to turn our society upside down.”

Hawktalon was at the Nucleus today, helping the analysts learn servo-squeak. But that was the easy part. What was to be done with all the servos that could talk?

“Where shall we draw the line?” Verid continued. “The nanas are all sentient, of course, and some of the trainsweeps—not all, the analysts assure me—and how about any old lump of nanoplast? A chunk the size of your fist holds ten times the neural connections of your brain.”

Raincloud shuddered. She was glad it was not her problem. “Maybe you should give up on servos. Plenty of foreigners could use the work.”

Verid laughed. “That’s what Valedon is afraid of; their industry will collapse. In fact, we’ve just hired a dozen young ‘nanas’ from L’li.”

“Great,” said Raincloud. “A ‘multicultural experience’ for your shonlings.”

“Exactly,” Verid agreed without irony. “Raincloud, you’ve been of inestimable help to us, with the Sharers and with your little nano-sentient friend. What are your plans for the future?”

“I’ve booked passage for my family at the end of the month.”

Verid nodded. “I’m sure your ‘clan’ will be happy to see you again. But you know, we still have much need of your services here. If you make it a return trip, I’ll pick up the cost.”

The thought of return sparked an unexpected longing—not for Elysium itself, but for Shora. The Sharers had crept into her life imperceptibly, filling needs she had not put a name to before. The children loved the ocean, and the raft. Blueskywind was back on Kshiri-el today, “sharing care” of Yshri’s daughter Morilla, who longed for the baby sister she would never have. The Windclans had built an addition onto Yshri’s silkhouse. They felt more at home on Kshiri-el than they ever had in Elysium.

But to abandon her clan again, perhaps forever, was an abyss. Raincloud shook her head slowly, thinking, she should run out of the office this minute.

“It’s up to you,” Verid assured her. “I’ve contacted the travel office, in case you change the ticket. Incidentally, are you aware that the physical enhancements you began for the Urulan trip can be continued? You could be as fit as Iras for, say, the next fifty years.”

Her face burned, and she gripped the chair. She could not say no; and she would not say yes. Damn these Elysians, she thought, they will buy me off, too.

Chapter 9

The shuttlecraft descended toward the water, where occasional greenish brown dots of raft seedlings bobbed on the waves. Soon the seedlings would crowd the ocean again, just as on the first day that the Windclans had arrived at Helicon.

Blackbear thought of this as he watched the late afternoon sun toss its sparkles across the ocean. Then he turned to Kal, who sat next to him wearing his talar of leafwings. Kal did not speak much; he seemed absorbed by an inner struggle to keep his balance. Blackbear touched his arm to reassure him.

“Attention,” called the shuttle. “The surface of Kshiri-el raft lies just below. See the lovely silken spires of the native Sharer dwellings. Prepare for landing.”

“‘Prepare for landing,’” echoed Sunflower happily, swinging his feet. “‘Prepare for landing,’ Daddy.”

Raincloud said, “Thank you,” to the shuttle voice. “Are you a nano-sentient now?”

“Yes I am. How did you ever guess? I’ve applied to draw a salary when the new plan goes into effect.”

“I’ll credit a tip to your account,” Raincloud promised.

The craft landed, and Hawktalon was the first at the door. She and Sunflower skipped out upon the raft moss, looking for a legfish to chase. Doggie had remained in Helicon; she had much business of her own these days, only visiting the Windclans on occasion.

The Sharers had prepared their usual communal supper outside for all the families of the raft. The odors of roasted fish and crustaceans and spiced seaweeds made Blackbear very hungry.

“Da-da, Da-da,” crowed Blueskywind, reaching out for her father as Morilla brought her over. Blackbear gathered the child into his arms.

As Kal approached, the Sharers surrounded him curiously. Their greetings and questions were polite at first, although they tugged at his talar as if not quite sure he was real.

“Are you really the Scribbler’s lovesharer?” Ooruwen demanded suddenly.

“I was,” said Kal.

“Then you can explain something. Why did he translate that compassion is ‘dangerous’?” she asked, using the Elysian word. “That’s not what the wordweaver said at all. Compassion is seductive, or dishonorable; that’s what was said. He got that wrong.”

“I’m sorry,” said Kal. “Perhaps I distracted him from his work.”

The Sharers laughed as if this were a good joke.

“Don’t mind Ooruwen,” said Eerea, arm in arm with Leresha. “She heard The Web from a different line of clickflies. There must have been eight eights of clickflies that carried off Cassi’s telling of The Web, and all their descendants mutated. Who knows how many different versions survive today?”

Raincloud tugged Blackbear’s arm and brushed her head on his chest. “Let’s walk off a bit.”

They walked to the water’s edge, where the huge trunks dipped gradually out to sea. “Da-da-da, click click,” babbled Blueskywind on his shoulder, as her little fingers tried unsuccessfully to dislodge the turban from his hair.

Blackbear remembered a dream that he had dreamed the night before, a particularly fantastic one. He had dreamed that he was a primordial germ cell in the hindgut of the embryo, starting to make the long amoeboid climb up the mesentery tissues into the developing gonads. All of his kinfolk were there, too, climbing up the giant folds of embryonic tissue; his parents, his brothers, even Quail with the twins on his back, on a journey as epic as any mountain climb. Few would make it to the end. And yet somehow the dream left him with a sense of peace.

Raincloud stopped at the branch and looked out down the watery channel. “I changed the ticket.”

“Then we are coming back.” He was pleased, not so much to avoid the devastation of his home town, but for another year of embryology to learn before he set off on his own. Another year with Kal, and Alin, and the Sharers. “Of course, Verid may not need you all year,” he pointed out, “with the election coming up.”

“Lem says that Verid will challenge Loris in the election. She had planned to, anyway; that’s partly why Hyen appointed her originally, as someone who might pursue his policies into the next rotation. That’s how the Elysian system works. She’ll probably win, unless Elysium collapses before then.”

“Do you really think Elysium will collapse?”

“If all the servos go free, and the network falls apart, and the banks start to fail...”

He shrugged. “A house collapses; life goes on.”

“I agree,” said Raincloud. “At the worst, we could always stay out here and fish.” She was silent for some minutes. “Of course, the longer we stay... the less likely we’ll ever leave again.”

This was a thought Blackbear had put off to the back of his mind. He swallowed something in his throat, but could say nothing.

“I can’t get around it, Blackbear. I keep thinking how the Clickers are doing fine, now, but at the rate we’re growing, our great-grandchildren will be just another starving population for Iras to buy off. That’s why I can’t face her yet.”

The words washed over him like a wave of cold water. He held Blueskywind tightly, and he thought one last time of their next six children who would never be born. A tear escaped him into the ocean, which scarcely needed it but would always be there.

With her parents out of sight, Hawktalon had slipped off her clothes again. They would scold her later, but really, nobody else on Kshiri-el wore clothes; her friends made fun of her.

She saw Leresha, the one with the funny crinkled skin, sitting on the raft moss to listen to the flute music, which seemed to wail and wobble around the air in the fading light. The Sharer reminded her somehow of Aunt Ashcloud. Hawktalon went over and boldly sat down before her.

“You’ve learned our tongue well, Hawktalon,” Leresha told her. “You speak as if you were born here.”

“I’m a linguist,” Hawktalon said proudly. “It’s in the blood.” She stared hard at the patchwork of the Sharer’s skin, which fascinated her no end. “Can you tell me something? How did your skin ever get that way?”

“Once, when I was your age,” Leresha said, “my sister fell into a nest of fleshborers. I dived in after her.”

“Oh, I see.” Hawktalon nodded. “That’s just what I would do.”

“Not too quickly, though. Always think first.”

“Did you save her?”

“Yes, because I kept my head above water, and because my cousins were there to help us. She was lost at sea several years ago, but her life is a beacon for me.”

Hawktalon had plenty to think about. She thought of how her father had said before they came to Elysium that they would find immortality. That scarcely made sense to her, as the High Priestess said that all living things had to die. But some things might live on after they died. Whatever immortality meant, somehow she had found it here

E N D

THE CHILDREN STAR – (Excerpt)
The Elysium Cycle Book 3

Joan Slonczewski

Phoenix Pick

An Imprint of Arc Manor

The Children Star copyright © 1998, 2010 Joan Slonczewski. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Rider, Manor Thrift and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

Cover illustration copyright © Nathan Silver, 2009. Used with permission.

ISBN (Digital Edition): 978-1-60450-412-5

ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-445-3

www.PhoenixPick.com

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Visit the Author’s Website at:

http://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/slonc.htm

Published by Phoenix Pick
an imprint of Arc Manor

P. O. Box 10339

Rockville, MD 20849-0339
www.ArcManor.com

*

For Jeanne and Ron

*

THE CHILDREN STAR

ONE

The sun crawled steadily up behind the dying city. Its rays stretched across towers and avenues to the hillside, through the window of a shack, to the eyelids of six-year-old ’jum. The sunbeams teased ’jum to wake up and look out upon Reyo City, and count the many lightcraft rising to meet the ships in orbit around L’li. But when she woke, her belly gnawed inside. Above Reyo, one glowing lightcraft rose, another came down...not the thousands she used to count. So she counted the sunbeams instead. So many sunbeams peeked out through the skyline that even ’jum could never count them all.

From behind she heard a scratching sound. In the corner scrabbled a rat, its nose twitching. ’jum watched the rat. Blood pounded in her ears, and her belly gnawed harder.

She felt in her pocket and grasped a stone, a good heavy one, while her eye still fixed on the rat. With all her strength she flung the stone.

Red lights flashed across her eyes, and her ears rang. But the rat lay there, twitching and squeaking, so she dragged herself over to it. After she broke its neck it lay still.

From outside came the cry of a crow, the whine of a beggar, the grating of a wheelbarrow up the steep path. Once, the shacks that crowded the hillside would have all been stirring by now, with sweepers, garbage pickers, a seller of tin scrap in the doorway. Now all were gone.

The wheelbarrow grated again and came to rest just outside. A hoarse voice called, “Any dead?”

The call had become a part of the morning routine, since the “creeping” had spread. The creeping began as a numbness in the fingers and toes that crept upward over several months. It spread among people living together; how, ’jum did not know.

“Any dead?” The call came closer now, and the barrow came to a halt just outside. Usually, ’jum’s mother would call to her from her bed, for ’jum to go out and answer. Of course, if no one answered, the man would just come in. Such a man with such a barrow had come in before, first for her sister, then her brother, then at last her father. Then the factory where ’jum worked had found out and sent her home. No more days of counting strange bits of metal to piece together, one thousand twenty-one, one thousand twenty-two; only the lightcraft to be counted, and the windows in the proud towers that reared opposite the hillside.

With an effort ’jum pulled herself up and pulled the paper back from the doorway. The man’s grayish brown arms poked like sticks through his cloak. His cart already held two twisted bodies. Now he stared back at ’jum.

’jum closed her lips tight and shook her head.

Expressionless, the man picked up the two handles of the barrow. The wheels creaked: one-and...two-and...’jum held on to their rhythmic sound. One always comes before two, and the digits of any number divisible by three add up to be divisible by three. As her family had subtracted, one by one, ’jum had added and multiplied, creating families of factors in her head. Six hundred ninety-three was a family of four: a seven, eleven, and twin threes...

’jum bit into the rat, tearing out its flesh as best she could. Then she thought of her mother, who could no longer rise from her sleeping mat and needed ’jum to feed her. ’jum felt her way across the room, lighted only by the window, to the mat where her mother slept, covered by a sack ’jum had salvaged from the factory still bearing the sign of Hyalite Nanotech. Her mother’s hand lay across it in the same position as the night before. Yet something had changed; the color of her hand was different, grayer. ’jum reached over and touched her mother’s hand.

The hand was a frozen claw. ’jum shivered all over, as if the cold from the hand seeped through her body.

The next thing she knew, she was standing outside, leaning against the shack. Her breath heaved, and her heart thumped as if it would burst from her chest. Behind her, the shack had filled with a chill emptiness that reached for her next.

She tried to run, but the effort of rushing outside had exhausted her. She stared out over the roofs of the shacks that clung to the hillside, to the office towers of Reyo. From the top of one tower a lightcraft grew a golden cone and rose to the sky. Above the towers shone a bright star. Her mother had called it the Children Star, a faraway paradise that children were born to when they died.

A cloud dimmed the sun, and now ’jum’s eyes could make out the windows in the towers. Broken panes hinted that even the most well-off had not escaped the creeping. ’jum calmed herself the one way she knew how, by counting the windows up and across; five times nine made forty-five, three times ten made thirty, and so on. In the old days at the factory she could have spent all day thus, counting the metal parts.

As ’jum counted, a man in a pale hooded robe climbed up the hill, along the rutted path that the carts barely managed. The man strode purposefully. For a moment he paused, as if looking for someone. Then he resumed his pace and came over deliberately to face ’jum. His figure towered over her, blocking the sun and the city. One so erect and strong could scarcely be mortal; he must be a god. Perhaps the very god of Death.

“Is that your home, little one?” Death’s voice was low, and his accent had a foreign edge. ’jum could only stare wonderingly. The hooded apparition half turned, as if uncertain. Then he said, “Is your mother home?”

So that was it. Death himself had come for her mother.

But this time, ’jum decided, he would fail. She drew herself up straight, planting her feet before the entrance to the shack. Her left hand dug deep into her pocket for the largest stone she had. As she clasped it, her eye judged her aim for the critical part of his anatomy.

Death awaited her reply. Hearing none, he took something from his cloak and held it out to her. It was a chunk of bread.

The smell of the bread overpowered her, so that she nearly fainted. She took the bread and tried to stuff it whole into her mouth, then she choked, as her throat was so dry. Expecting this, he produced a flask of water, miraculously clear and fresh. For the next few minutes she applied herself to consuming the bread and water, forgetting anything else existed. She barely noticed as the man passed her to enter the shack, then came out.

“Child,” he said, putting his hood back so that wisps of hair blew across his face. “What is your name?”

’jum did not answer. Her name meant “pig urine,” which her mother had intended to discourage evil spirits after losing two previous infants. But now she scanned the man’s face. He was younger than she had thought, his cheeks smooth and tanned, with a neatly cropped beard. His blue eyes fairly glowed.

Something glinted on his chest, something hung on a chain. It was a transparent stone, as blue as his eyes. A sunbeam struck it, revealing a hidden star within, a star composed of three intercepting shafts. The star could define six triangles, with six sides shared and six outside, and seven connecting points.

“You may call me Brother Rod.” His voice interrupted her study of the stone. “Come with me,” said Brother Rod. “You’ll always have enough to eat, where we’re going. It’s a different world, far from here, at a far star.”

At that, ’jum’s lips parted and her eyes widened. “The Children Star.”

He smiled, like her older brother used to. “‘The Children Star,’” he repeated. “That would be a good name for it.”

By this time two beggars had found Brother Rod, and they grasped his cloak, whining for bread. He took out more bread and distributed it, while leading ’jum up the path to the top of the hill. When the bread was gone he spread his hands, but the beggars keened after him. So he gave them some coins, and his watch. Then he drew himself up and sketched a strange sign in the air. “The Spirit be with you, Citizens.” His voice was firm, and the muscles rippled in his forearm. The beggars moved off.

At the top of the hill Brother Rod came to a halt. In the sky a glowing disk descended beneath a cone of boiling air. As the lightcraft came near, it hissed ever louder, and its heat baked ’jum’s face. But she stood there bravely until the craft settled upon the hill.

The lightcraft rose on its beam of microwaves, lifting Brother Rhodonite and the child toward the ship that would soon cross the space folds. His last child that year, Rod realized with a wrench in his heart. L’li had once been a beautiful world, but its forty billion humans had long ago tilled its last acre and filled its last air with haze. Only the “creeping” had finally reversed its growth and started a ghastly decline. Elsewhere, citizens of the other six worlds of the Free Fold either shrugged in despair, or felt secret relief that something at last would curb the L’liite population. Rod sketched a starsign and silently prayed the Spirit to heal them all.

The Sacred Order of the Spirit was the most ancient religious order in the Fold. Their roots reached back before the Free Fold, to Valedon, the gemstone world, in an age when world warred against world. Each Spirit Caller wore on his neck a Valan sapphire star. The star’s three shafts of light spelled the threefold call of truth, grace, and spirit; and wherever these were needed, Spirit Callers went. Brother Rod had been called to L’li.

“Thanks for the smooth ride,” he told the lightcraft. Foreign money kept L’liite transport running for the tourists, but declined to cure her citizens.

“You’re welcome, Citizen.” The lightcraft was an electronic sentient, no mere servo machine. Modern Valedon was known for both, and Rod knew better than to miss the difference. “I don’t often take passengers from that hill; and if things keep getting worse, I’ll quit the planet altogether. Do you return to Valedon, Brother Rhodonite?”

“No, Citizen. To Prokaryon.”

Prokaryon was a virginal frontier world, at a star two space folds away. With his fellow Callers, Rod collected dying orphans from L’li to join a small colony on Prokaryon. The child he had just collected was pale with fear; Rod held her close, wishing he could explain the wonders her future held on a world full of food, free of “creeping.”

“Prokaryon!” exclaimed the lightcraft. “Are you human? I hope your cells have good arsenic pumps.”

Rod smiled. “They do.” Unlike Valedon, Prokaryon was not terraformed, for today the Fold forbade alien ecocide. But Prokaryon’s alien ecology, full of arsenic and triplex DNA, poisoned human bodies. Unless, of course, they were lifeshaped, their genes modified to survive. Lifeshaping took best in young children.

Out the viewport, the boarding station loomed ahead, its hull displaying the vista of ancient L’liite temples. The lightcraft docked, and its round door fused to that of the station like two mouths kissing. An entrance opened through the fused doors and widened into a corridor.

Above the corridor, floating fingers pointed to Rod’s feet. “Watch your step,” a voice whispered in six languages.

Rod caught the child’s hand, remembering that she might never have seen such a place. He ignored the virtual newscaster announcing new jump holes through the space folds, and new Elysian bank deals to finance copper mines on Prokaryon. Virtual doorways juxtaposed Reyo City’s nightlife with that of Elysium—the wealthiest world of the Fold, where people stayed young for a thousand years. Rod himself had toured the hot spots of Elysium, as a young Guardsman on leave. But he had left all that behind ten years ago, to follow the Spirit.

At his cabin, the door molded itself open. Rod sketched a starsign to his fellow traveler, Brother Geode.

“Back at last, Brother.” One of Geode’s six limbs sketched the star in return. “What kept you so long?” Like the lightcraft, Brother Geode was a sentient. Self-aware machines were called “sentients” ever since their revolt against their human creators two centuries before. Sentients were built of nanoplast, trillions of microscopic servos. Geode himself had a torso of nanoplast about the size and shape of a pillow, with his star sapphire nearly buried in blue fur. His nanoplastic limbs could extend and mold themselves to any length and thinness. His limbs sported fur in each of the primary colors, giving him the appearance of a giant multicolored tarantula.

At the moment, Brother Geode had one red furry limb cupped to cradle a tiny infant, while a yellow limb fed it cultured breast milk. Three other infants slept in nanoplastic nooks nearby; the entire ship itself was a sentient. Brother Rod had brought all four of the infants from an orphanage in Reyo. The orphanage had run out of formula months ago; the infants, just left there that day, would not have lasted the week.

“I found one more Spirit child.”

The girl flexed her toes in the carpet and stared wide-eyed at the sight of Geode.

From a nook in the wall, a baby several weeks old awoke with a cry and stretched his trembling arms. Rod went over and swaddled him, then tucked him under his arm, as a bottle slid out from the dispensary window. The bottle held breast milk as “real” as a mother’s, including cultured lymphocytes. The infant soon settled against his chest, gazing upward into Rod’s eyes. With barely more weight on him than the newborns, his limbs were wobbly sticks, but the milk would bring him round. How resilient infants were.

Geode’s two eyestalks rose from his torso like periscopes and trained on the girl. “An older child?” He spoke in Elysian, the language sentients preferred; they, like Elysians, were forever young. “An older child—not again. You’ve grown soft, Brother.”

“She looks barely two.”

“Malnourished. She’s six if I’m a day. An older child,” Geode repeated. “You know what the Reverend Mother will say.”

The Reverend Mother Artemis had founded their colony on Prokaryon. It was she who first called Rod to the Spirit, in his final year at the Guard Academy. He still could not think of her except with a sense of awe.

“The Reverend Mother will say we cast our nets well,” Rod replied. “I climbed the hill and brought what I found. Not a child under five was left alive.”

“She’ll spend a year in the gene clinic, vomiting half the time,” Geode added, “and we’ll be the next ten years paying her off.” Infants up to eighteen months could be processed in a couple of weeks; older children took much longer, and adults might never make it. Rod himself had spent three years in treatment, yet he still could eat nothing grown on Prokaryon.

Was Geode right? he wondered. The child’s eyes had arrested him, there on that hill; those eyes had clutched his heart against his reason....But the Spirit within had called to him, saying, This is the one.

Rod adjusted the baby in his arms, holding up the tiny head. Then he turned to the girl. “See, child,” he told her in L’liite. “This will be your new brother on Prokaryon. You’ll have thirty-nine brothers and sisters—think of it. You’ll grow your own food, and even mine your own gemstones.”

Geode’s eyestalks twisted quizzically. “She hasn’t taken her eyes off me. What must she be thinking, to go off with such strangers?”

“What child was not born to strangers?”

Two of Geode’s limbs began to mold themselves into probes to examine the girl’s health. “I was never born. I was built—to precise specifications. I make fewer mistakes than one byte in a trillion trillions.”

Rod smiled. “You had to be taught to think.”

Ignoring this jibe, Geode extended a long, slender tendril out of his furry limb toward the girl, who moved back a step. Brother Rod put his arm around her. “Let Geode treat you, child. He will help your stomach feel better. Then we’ll have a good bath, and a good dinner.”

The tendril wound around the girl’s arm, inserting a microscopic probe which she would not feel. The probe would sample her blood for her own DNA and proteins, as well those of any pathogens. “Her name is ’jum G’hana,” Geode announced, matching the gene sequence with his database.

The girl blinked at the sound of her name amidst the foreign gibberish. A sharp mind, Rod thought.

“She was first sampled at approximate age three, upon hiring full-time at Hyalite Nanotech. Father died of ‘creeping,’ mother alive, age—”

“Her mother’s dead,” Rod corrected. “Creeping” sickness was caused by prions, misfolded proteins that directed normal ones to mimic their structure and accumulate in the motor neurons. Paralysis crept from the limbs and inward. Other types of prion infection were contained in the nervous system, but the dreaded “creeping” prions leaked out in secretions and infected others.

“She has lice and worms,” continued Geode. “And prions, though not yet irreversible.” So she did have the disease, as Rod suspected from her mottled legs. Even her relatives, had she any, would never claim her. The emigration forms would go straight through.

The cure for creeping was to inject millions of nanoservos, microscopic servo machines, into the bloodstream to methodically search and reshape the misfolded proteins. It was effective, but expensive. On Prokaryon, the Fold paid to cure colonists, to encourage human settlement.

“She wasn’t badly nourished, her first three years.” Geode’s infant had done feeding and was now bouncing in one coiled limb. “Maybe she’s not even brain-damaged. Say, ’jum,” the sentient demanded in L’liite, “did you go to school? Can you read?”

’jum slowly shook her head.

“Can you count your factory wages?”

At that, ’jum did not answer but gave the sentient an intent look.

“What’s one plus one?”

She frowned, as if this were a very difficult problem. “Not quite one and a half,” she said in a voice so low that Rod barely heard.

Geode twined his eyestalks disparagingly.

“What do you expect? She’s never been to school. Is your workup done? She needs a bath.”

“Definitely,” the sentient agreed with emphasis. “I don’t know, though. I wonder sometimes if we’re not half-crazy, trying to settle a frontier with starving babies.”

“It’s the cheapest way,” Rod said ironically, for that was the reason of the Fold.

“But—look, you know, it’s not just any world, by Torr. It’s Prokaryon.”

Prokaryon was named for its unique “prokaryotic” life-forms. Animal or vegetable, all Prokaryan cells contained circular chromosomes, free of nuclear membranes—like bacteria, prokaryotes. But Prokaryan cells were ring-shaped as well. And the higher structure of all the multicellular organisms was toroid, from the photosynthetic “phycoids” that grew tall as trees, to the tire-shaped “zoöids” that rolled over the fields they grazed—or preyed upon those that did.

“And I don’t care what the Free Fold says,” Geode added. “There are intelligent natives running Prokaryon. Somewhere.”

Rod held the baby tighter in his arm. “Don’t spread rumors, Brother.” Such stories arose whenever a new world was settled, even on Valedon long after it was boiled and terraformed.

Geode snaked an eyestalk toward him. “Can you explain how Prokaryon has all those rows of forest, one after another, all across the continent? Who tends the garden?”

“The Elysian scientists have been looking for years. They found no one, and the Fold certified the planet empty of intelligence. Do you want to get our colony evicted?”

“The truth is what I seek, Brother,” insisted Geode. “You explain how the weather stays the same all year, only raining at night, or a cloudburst to put out a fire.”

Looking away, Rod placed the sleeping infant gently at the wall, where the nanoplast obligingly molded inward to cradle it.

“Humans,” Geode added with bemusement. “Will humans ever know an ‘intelligent’ creature, if they find one? They took centuries just to recognize us sentients, out of their own factories.”

TWO

Fed, scrubbed, clothed, and medicated, the six new Spirit children endured their week-long journey through the space folds to Prokaryon. Of course, none of them could yet set foot on their new home. Merely inhaling Prokaryan air would expose their unprepared lungs to poison; for the native life-forms had evolved all sorts of things that the ordinary human body was not designed to encounter, much less digest for food. Their triplex chromosomes were mutagenic, their “proteins” contained indigestible amino acids, and their membranes were full of arsenic. Prokaryan cells were not exactly good to eat—unless you were Prokaryan.

So the children’s first stop was a satellite, the Fold Council Station for Xenobiotic Research and Engineering. “Station” was actually a giant sentient whose brain directed the investigation of Prokaryan life-forms, as well as the transport and lifeshaping of colonists. Station’s lifeshapers would inject the new children with nanoservos, microscopic machines to put special genes into the cells of the liver and intestines. The special genes would teach their cells how to detoxify unfamiliar Prokaryan molecules, and to eat them as food, as easily as they ate the nutrients from their own world. For adults the lifeshaping was slow and inefficient; thus, most Prokaryan colonies depended heavily on sentients.

Rod often wondered how the rest of the Fold’s worlds would ever have gotten settled, had they all tried to avoid terraforming. Valedon, and all but two of the other worlds, had been boiled off and reseeded with human-compatible life-forms. But today people called that “planetary ecocide.” Rod himself had been skeptical, until he came to Prokaryon and fell in love with its mysterious beauty. He could not imagine terraforming such a world.

The cylindrical bulk of Station grew until it dwarfed the approaching ship. “All passengers prepare to disembark.” The voice of the great sentient vibrated throughout the ship, as she extended her docking tube.

Rod tensed at her greeting. Besides her gene clinic, Station directed scientists from all the worlds of the Fold who came to study Prokaryon’s biosphere and confirm its absence of intelligent natives, a legal requirement for exploitation. Above all, she governed Prokaryan settlement on behalf of the Fold. She set each colony’s immigration quota, and determined when each lifeshaped immigrant was ready to settle.

Brother Geode crawled out on three of his furry limbs, carrying babies in his other three, while Rod carried two and ’jum gamely managed one. The tube rotated steadily, generating about half a unit of centrifugal force, enabling them to walk while keeping their baggage light. But the sense of weight loss alarmed the babies, for their stomachs told them they were falling, no matter how hard Rod clutched them in his arms. The little bundles stiffened, then emptied their lungs to howl. Overhead, upside down in the cylinder, two or three travelers stretched their necks at this unusual scene. A gorilla face stared down at Rod; a simian hybrid woman wearing a student’s backpack. Rod stared back, for simians were rare out here.

Beneath Rod’s feet the floor shifted sickeningly. That meant the lock had engaged, and they now stood in the innermost ring of Station. The babies sucked in their breaths and wailed.

“Brother Geode, immigration officer of the Spirit Colony.” Station’s voice boomed, ever-present within the satellite. “Six new colonists?”

“Yes, Station.” Geode bounced the three infants in his arms, trying to quiet them.

“You exceed your quota again.”

“Yes, Station.”

It was Rod’s fault that they always pushed the immigration limit. In his days at the Guard, he had always tried to steal one last round of shooting beyond regulations; now, he always took one more dying child. “They’re all healthy,” Rod insisted. “They’ll be productive citizens.”

“And one is an older child,” Station emphasized. “Brother Geode, you will see me for consultation.”

“I will,” said Rod. They always got away with it before.

“Please sign the release for each.”

On the wall a bright rectangle appeared, its text scrolling absurdly fast. Rod had no need to read the contents. The release form required all immigrants to acknowledge that Prokaryon’s biosphere was only partly understood, and its climate not yet controlled, and that the appearance of any plague threatening the Fold might require defensive action—before all inhabitants could be evacuated. Rod despised the provision, and its authors in the Fold Council, who feared another prion plague. Prions arose from human bodies, not from a world where humans could barely live.

Geode held up his infants to press the document with their toes, and Rod did likewise.

“Reverend Mother is here,” said Geode. Sentients communicated by internal radio.

At the gate stood the Reverend Mother Artemis. Her face was a screen across which her “features” shaped and reshaped in ever-changing colors. Her sapphire star gleamed where a human neck would be. Around her face twined restless strands of nanoplastic “hair,” as if individually alive. Below her neck hung multiple breasts, and her robe revealed skirts full of holographic bears, lions, even flying fish from the Elysian ocean. Children were her life-work, ever since she herself had been manufactured to raise wealthy Elysians. After earning her freedom as a sentient, she had joined the Sacred Order.

The Reverend Mother’s nanoplastic hand traced a six-point star. “Brother Rod. You return with your nets full.” She took the two little ones, who quieted as they stared.

Rod returned the sign. “I wish it could be otherwise.”

“So do we all.” Strands of her hair twisted upward. “We call on the Spirit to hear the agony of the L’liites. But this mystery has endless depth and no shore.”

“How are the children back home?”

“All well, thank the Spirit. The phycoids are ready for harvest, and T’kun found a perfect pink crystal in the stream.”

“Well, we bring you future harvesters.”

Geode warned in Elysian, “One of them will cost us a bundle.”

“And which one would that be?” The Reverend Mother scooped up another infant from him. “Which one would you refuse?”

’jum was watching her skirt, mesmerized by the rearing bear. Rod squeezed ’jum’s hand encouragingly. “This is the Reverend Mother of the Spirit Colony of Prokaryon. You will be our own child.”

The Reverend Mother spread her arms and spoke in clear L’liite. “’jum G’hana, are you my little bird singing in the tree?” Her voice had just the right rhythm, as if she had been born and raised in the streets of Reyo.

’jum ran to her, immediately to be swept up in the arms and skirt. Mother Artemis was always like that.

“There, my little bird. It’s too soon for you to talk, isn’t it, but won’t you shape for me?” Mother Artemis stepped over to the holostage.

Above the holostage a ball of light appeared, as if suspended by magic. Mother Artemis reached to it with her hands and shaped it like a lump of clay. It formed the shape of a flower, with a dozen petals that she pulled one by one, each perfect as a teardrop.

Then a second ball of light appeared. “It’s your turn, ’jum. Won’t you try? Shape me something from your home.”

’jum put out a tentative finger. She poked the ball, and a depression remained. Encouraged, she pulled it into a tall oblong shape and poked more holes in an orderly array, eight across, row upon row, more than a dozen.

“That’s lovely,” Mother Artemis exclaimed. “Was that your house where you lived?”

’jum shook her head. She paused as if in thought. Then abruptly she squeezed the light into an amorphous lump and began shaping again, with precise details. Her sureness suggested that her fingers had shaped such an object before, perhaps many times. It was a box with three prongs at right angles to one another, and two unidentified levers at the side. It looked so realistic, one might pluck it solid from the air.

“What have we here?” Mother Artemis spoke in a low voice. She trained her visual sensors on the object; her true “eyes,” set at her neckline, rather than her apparent eyes in her face. She called up a vast database from all seven worlds of the Fold.

Above the three-pronged image, a shape of red light appeared, similar in form to the one ’jum had made. The red shape descended and merged with the white one; it was nearly a perfect fit.

“It’s a lanthanide extractor,” the Reverend Mother explained in Elysian.

“Of course,” said Geode. “She must have assembled them at the Hyalite plant—thousands of them.”

Rod eyed the device sternly. “They’re illegal.”

“Not their manufacture,” said the Reverend Mother. “Only the use to which some are put.” Lanthanide extractors were used to sort rare-earth minerals from rock. All the inhabited worlds had long ago exhausted their natural supplies of rare-earth elements, prized for many uses in nanocircuitry. So the main place left to use extractors was new planets. But that was against the law of the Fold. A world could be mined only after scientists had established, and the Secretary of the Free Fold decreed, that no intelligent natives had prior claim.

Still, who could police the universe? The Hyalite House, an ancient and respectable firm based on Valedon, put its assembly plant in a decaying L’liite city where starving six-year-olds would not recognize the device, and no one would ask where it ended up.

Geode extended an arm. “They can’t use them here.” On Prokaryon, mining was permitted only with macroscopic implements, and only up to one percent of the planetary resource, until the new world gained independence and could choose for itself.

Mother Artemis turned to ’jum. “You must have made many of those pieces, little bird.”

“Two thousand five hundred and thirty-one,” the girl murmured.

“What a number. And you counted every one?”

’jum nodded. “It’s a family without children.”

Mother Artemis nodded. “You like numbers, don’t you. I’ll bet you know all your sums.”

’jum lowered her eyes. Then she looked up. “Three plus four is five.”

At this unaccountable calculation, Mother Artemis paused. “How about three times four?”

“Three times four is twelve.”

“Eight times thirteen?”

“One hundred and four.”

“What are the factors of three thousand and three?” When ’jum hesitated, she added, “The ‘children’?”

“Three, seven, eleven, and thirteen. A family of four children.” Then abruptly she burst into tears, crying for her mother. Mother Artemis held her close, knowing she would have a lot more crying to do before she could face a new life. Two of the infants started crying, too.

“I wonder how she’s adding,” Mother Artemis said in Elysian. “Never mind; she’ll learn as fast as a sentient.”

Geode’s limbs snaked out to lift and comfort the agitated infants. “At least that part of our job will come easy.”

“No—much harder,” the Reverend Mother warned.

“Humans,” groaned Geode, his fifth limb shaking a milk bottle. “How did I ever get into this?” The woolly armed sentient had shepherded Spirit children for a decade, thought Rod with a smile.

Mother Artemis was whispering to ’jum. “Geode will take good care of you at Station, until you’re set to join us. You can call me anytime you like, on the holostage. Behold—as one of our family, you have a new name: ’jum G’hana Spirit. And here is your sign.” She pinned to ’jum’s ragged shirt a sapphire, a tiny pink gem one of the children had strained from the gravel bed. A sapphire from Prokaryon.

The children would stay at Station with Geode, for their treatments. This left the Spirit Colony understaffed, with only Rod, Mother Artemis, and Brother Patella, a sentient physician, to manage the children on Prokaryon. But within a month the babies could come home. What to do with ’jum thereafter would have to be worked out. They could not afford a skinsuit, to protect her on Prokaryon until she was lifeshaped.

Before leaving, Rod transferred his holocube of ’jum’s home in Reyo to the brain of Station. Station obligingly shaped a room whose shape and colors roughly matched the shack, plus a comfortable mat on the floor, and the food synthesizer put out an “authentic” L’liite meal. Later the child would have to make do with the same inexpensive food pellets that Rod did, until her lifeshaping reached the point that she could eat native crops.

As Rod and the Reverend Mother took their leave, Brother Geode had stretched and lengthened three of his limbs and tied them into an elaborate knot for ’jum. “First off, which is my right arm?” He wiggled the three fuzzy ends projecting from the knot.

’jum inspected closely, then tapped one end. The entire limb turned yellow throughout the knot, revealing its hidden structure.

“Right!” exclaimed the sentient. “Now let’s see, how would you undo it?”

Rod felt proud. A child who learned fast—she might even become the doctor someday, like their own Brother Patella. He had listened well, when the Spirit called him upon that hill.

To reach the planet, the Spirit Colony leased a lightcraft from Station. The craft, a reconditioned economy model, was not sentient, only programmed to shuttle up and down. Its rectenna had darkened all around, and it bore an acrid smell. Two worn seats held Rod and Mother Artemis. The craft shuddered as it launched, and a small holostage at eye level showed the satellite shrinking away. Beyond in the blackness appeared the neutrino receiver, a giant silver sphere full of water to detect the massless particles carrying signals through the space folds.

“Brother Patella will be glad to see you back,” the Reverend Mother observed. “T’kun smuggled a baby four-eyes into the nursery. And a ‘tumble-round’ has grown well into the garden; it’s looking in at Haemum’s window!”

Rod smiled remorsefully. “I’ve been away too long—and only bring back more trouble.”

“Why else are we here?”

The lightcraft whined as it entered the atmosphere, the air above heating into plasma. Above the holostage, the image of Prokaryon expanded, its greens and blues cloaked in cloud, beautiful and terrifying, yet vulnerable, like a woman’s eye. As the surface neared, a brilliant expanse of ocean met the shore of their continent, Spirilla, a twisted spiral of green and gray. The world rotated slowly downward beneath the lightcraft. In the western arm of Spirilla, pale scars marked the copper mines. To the east rolled the uncharted interior, circled by glacial mountains.

As the craft fell toward the green, curious patterns emerged. Long dark bands ran in parallel rows, winding like a string picture. The dark bands were singing-tree forests. Each band of forest alternated with a paler band of wheelgrass, merging into wetland, which gave way to the next band of forest. Over and over the same pattern repeated, ceasing only at the mountains.

What Spirit had dipped a finger in the ink of foliage and drawn those lines? And whose hand tended them still? Not a seed of wheelgrass could a human plant on forest land, even with the singing-trees cleared; yet singing-tree pods would only wither where the wheelgrass grew.

The old lightcraft dipped and veered suddenly, caught in a gust of wind. Rod gripped his chair automatically, though it made little difference, as its nanoplastic limbs held him fast. “I hope at least it lands us in the right band.” The craft had been known to miss the band of wheelgrass that contained the colony, leaving the passengers to hike through several kilometers of singing-trees.

“Patella doesn’t answer,” said the Reverend Mother. “Who knows what the young ones are up to.”

No answer from Patella? That was odd. Wherever he was, Brother Patella could hear Mother Artemis from the lightcraft, then send out Haemum or one of the ten-year-olds with the llamas for them to ride home.

As it happened, they landed in wheelgrass, not far from the trail. The wheelgrass spread in waves all around them. A welcome scent of ginger blew in from the distant singing-trees, always a sign he was really home.

High in the ever-blue sky shone Prokaryon’s sun, Iota Pavonis, proud as an albino peacock. The thin ozone layer blocked less of the sun’s ultraviolet than on other worlds supporting life. That might be one reason triple-stranded chromosomes had evolved here, to protect DNA from mutation. Prokaryan weather, like its landscape, had a predictable pattern: sunshine every day, with gentle rain in the evening.

But far to the east, past the dark line of hills, the clouds could burst into unexpected storms. And above those clouds hovered the peaks of Mount Anaeon and Mount Helicon. The tallest peaks had been named for the twelve floating cities of Elysium, who had bankrolled the first explorers. They may have regretted the naming, for the mountains proved unlucky, full of landslides and other accidents for hapless prospectors. Many colonists blamed Prokaryon’s “hidden masters,” a claim hard to disprove.

Still there was no sign of Haemum’s llama, its ears pointing out like flags, its broad feet bred specially to tramp the loopleaves down. Rod turned to Mother Artemis. “No word yet from Brother?”

“He must be running after Gaea and T’kun again.”

That would not keep Patella from answering. Patella, like Geode and Mother Artemis, could manage several tasks at once. Unless he was conducting a very complex operation...Rod felt a chill at his neck. “I’ll go ahead and send the llama back for you.”

The Reverend Mother smoothed his shoulder. “The Spirit go with you. Excuse me while I sleep.” She drew in her arms, which lost form in the shadows of her sleeves. Her figure seemed to pull itself in and turned gray all over. Rod had seen her “sleep,” though she tried to hide it from the children. Sentients had to save their energy, for if their power packs ran out, their minds would die. That was their one weakness as colonists.

He returned her touch lightly, thinking, how odd that this gray shape was actually such an extraordinary person. Then he stepped outside. The sun was warm, so he took off his robe, revealing dun-colored everyday trousers much worn and stained. Tucking the robe under his arm, he strode resolutely out into the wheelgrass. The gray-green loopleaves of the wheelgrass twisted and caught his toe at every step; it took him a quarter hour just to cover the few meters to the trail. High above him buzzed several helicoids, their ring-shaped propellers clattering as if laughing at him.

Ahead, a herd of four-eyes rolled away like tire tubes, with no legs to get caught in the wheelgrass. Each four-eyes had four compound eyes spaced evenly along the “tread” of its “tire,” the upper two eyes alert and watchful, the lower two asleep; the eyes took turns sleeping. In between each pair of eyes was a rasping mouth, so each mouth faced downward in turn to consume wheelgrass. Extensible suckers covered the rest of the creature’s surface; to move forward, it simply contracted the foremost sucker and lifted up the hindmost, rolling over the wheelgrass. By this repeated motion, the little zoöid could work up a remarkable speed in either direction. Rod hoped no zoöid predator would come barreling after them and mistake him for edible prey.

Once on the clear trail he jogged easily, his feet eating up the miles. A couple of whirrs alighted on his arm, miniature helicoids the size of a pinhead. Finding no zoöid secretions to feed on, the whirrs soon left, very different from the insects he had grown up with on Valedon. The wind brought snatches of song from the singing-trees at the far edge of the wheelgrass. At last the wheelgrass gave way to brokenhearts, golden ringlets like so many lost wedding bands. The protein-rich brokenhearts were cultivated to feed the lifeshaped children.

At last the colony’s nursery and dining hall appeared, jutting out of the hillside below the sapphire mine. The long mud-colored buildings were built of ring-fungus, a tough growth that could be pressed into shapes and dried hard as wood.

As he approached, twelve-year-old Haemum came running out to meet him. The founding child of the family, she now stood nearly as tall as he and seemed to be all legs. Her skirt and scarf were made of the same cloth that they all wove and dyed of fibrous loopleaves. She threw her arms around Rod, pressing her black curls to his chest. “Brother Rod, thank the Spirit you’re here,” she exclaimed in L’liite. “We don’t know what to do—Brother Patella fell down the ravine, and he must have got ‘broken.’”

“Broken how? Where is he now?”

Two of the boys were running out, ten-year-old Chae and four-year-old T’kun, with his arm ominously bound in a sling. Then little Gaea dragged herself through the dust on her arms, her paralyzed legs trailing behind her. Gaea had spina bifida—Brother Geode had thrown up his woolly arms when Rod picked that one, but so it was. The colony would save enough to fix her, someday.

“It was T’kun’s fault,” Haemum explained. “T’kun was running ahead and playing space pirate, and when I called after him he got mad. He tripped and slid down the bank, tumbling over. Brother Patella tried to get him out, but he slipped, too, and fell farther. Then he turned all gray and lumpy, and wouldn’t answer.”

Gaea grabbed his ankle and clung, and he nearly lost balance. “Bro-der Rod, T’kun bring home zoöid! We play with zoöid!” Zoöids in the nursery would not do; but it would have to wait.

“Did you call Station?” Rod asked Haemum.

“I did, but the medics haven’t shown up yet. I finally dragged T’kun back up and set his arm as best I could....”

Rod clenched his fist, then caught it in his palm. As usual the Spirit Colony was not Station’s first priority. No billion-credit shipment of ore would be lost if Patella were crippled, or worse. “Can the boys lead me out to him?”

“I will, I will,” cried T’kun.

Rod patted his head. “Good—but be careful. And you, Chae, mind Gaea and the babies.” He extricated his ankle from Gaea’s fingers and swung her up for Chae, who staggered as he carried her off. “Haemum, you’ll need to ride the llamas out for the Reverend Mother; we touched down just west of the trail. Remember, she’ll be ‘asleep.’”

Haemum raced off to fetch the llamas, her skirt flashing colors in the sun. Rod followed T’kun up the trail by the rushing stream, into the hills full of sapphires and other marketable stones. Here the wheelgrass gave way to a coarse dark shrub, with dense loopleaves. A flock of helicoids rose up suddenly, the sunlight glinting on their propellers.

“There!” T’kun shouted, and tried to point, then winced at the pain in his bound arm.

Rod caught sight of the gray shape, tumbled several meters down a steep bank. It looked nothing like Patella, whose form resembled Geode’s. He froze, sick at heart. If Patella’s nanoplastic body had not fixed itself by now, the news might be bad. Even if his neural circuits were intact, he would have to be shipped back to Elysium to retrain. And the colony would have to do without a doctor.

The emergency squad from Station came at last. A sleek glowing disk burned its way through the air and set itself down precisely, right on the trail that overlooked the ravine. For a moment Rod envied the sentient lightcraft, then he suppressed the unworthy thought.

From the craft emerged two medical sentients, their bodies shaped like caterpillars. They crawled down the ravine to rescue the injured doctor, not deigning to speak to Rod. As they lifted the shapeless nanoplast into their craft, Rod felt the full shock of his loss. He had worked with Patella ever since he came here; now, in an instant, his brother was gone.

Meanwhile, the older children were coming home from the gravel pit with carts full of corundum and occasional gem-quality stones. Mother Artemis, now returned, was nursing the four youngest ones, including the twins Pima and Pomu, whom Rod had picked up last year. Then she called the older children over for writing lessons.

Rod checked T’kun’s arm, which Haemum seemed to have bound up reasonably straight, as far as he could tell. He would bring the boy up to Station the next day for a scan. In the meantime, the watering tubes for the vegetables had broken down, helicoids hung by their sucker mouths from the gutters, and besides, a tumbleround had invaded the garden.

“Look at it, Brother Rod,” Haemum exclaimed. “It’s the biggest tumbleround I ever saw.”

The tire shape of the tumbleround looked partly deflated, its lower half collapsed into the ground. Twisted loopleaves stuck out in all directions, some extended to root in the ground. The plant-creature smelled like glue and invariably attracted clouds of thirsty whirrs. A tumbleround generally rooted and grew in one spot for a long while; but under certain conditions, perhaps nitrogen deficiency, some of its vines would root themselves in the ground at one edge, then contract, pulling the organism to tumble it over slightly. More vines then rooted down, and so forth; once the tumbleround got going, it could travel several meters per day, trampling and digesting whatever vegetation crossed its path. Scientists disputed whether they were more animal or plant, zoöid or phycoid; “phycozoöid” was the term in favor. Whether plant or animal, this one was as tall as Rod and perhaps twice his weight.

“It’s been there for the longest time, just outside the fence, you remember.” Haemum pointed to the long slimy trail full of broken tendril loops, leading in through the crushed fence. “After you left, one night it just started to move, and kept coming until...”

The scent blew toward them. For a moment Rod felt light-headed, and he caught himself up just in time. Then he realized that he had not gotten around to eating anything since breakfast on the ship. He shook himself and straightened. “Well, Sister—what shall we do with our guest?”

Haemum put her hands on her hips. “We could chop it up. If we chop the pieces small enough, they won’t grow back. We can scoop them out and dry the hide to make shoes.”

A tedious, gruesome task, but it would work. And yet...Why had this thing come to peek in the window? What if this whirr-clouded beast really was one of the planet’s hidden masters? Station said no, tumblerounds had no IQ to speak of.

“We’ll dig it out and haul it off,” Rod decided. So they set to work with the shovels, all the while brushing whirrs out of their eyes and mouths, taking breaks when the fumes overpowered them. A sentient lifter could have done it in a minute, but the colony could not afford such. The work of one’s hands was a gift to the Spirit.

At last, Rod raised the stinking creature out of its hole, where the loops of its roots lay gashed. His muscles bulged as he lifted it onto the cart, first one side of it, then the other. Three llamas pulled the cart, spitting in protest, while the two colonists pushed from behind, driving it out as far as they could before they dumped the tumbleround out. It would root again in no time.

Just before dinner, while helping Pima and Pomu wash their faces, Rod remembered to call Geode. So he hurried off down the hall to the holostage. The twins, who immediately knew what he was after, plodded after him excitedly.

As Rod entered the cylindrical chamber, the usual column of light shone up from the stage; the twins cooed in delight. Soon Brother Geode himself appeared, full of good spirits and just as delighted to see them. “My two little dears!” the sentient exclaimed. “Alike as two parts from the same factory—and walking, already! Why, we weren’t gone but three weeks.”

“I thought you’d be pleased,” said Rod. “But I’m sorry about Patella.”

“I can’t believe it. I just can’t bear to think of it.” Three of his arms waved violently in the air, twining and untwining. He and Patella had been built to the same model and shipped from the same Hyalite plant on Valedon. Both had earned their freedom in an Elysian nursery, as had Mother Artemis. “I just hope his central processor’s okay, so he can reshape himself.” He shuddered all over. “How will you ever manage? I’d better come down.”

“But the babies need you. How is ’jum?”

“’jum is right here. Don’t shrink away, girl—look, here’s Brother Rod.”

The light-shape of ’jum appeared, wide-eyed and uncertain. She extended her arm, then pulled it back as if remembering. Rod felt bad about leaving her, though they had no choice. “I’ll come up soon to hug you, ’jum. Look,” he said, nudging the twins. “See your little brothers. We all can’t wait to have you home.”

As he finally went in to dinner, Haemum was leading the singing at the head of one of the two long tables. Let us love only truth, desire only grace, and know only Spirit....Haemum took her devotions seriously, and planned to join the order when she came of age. The children were a cheery sight, their starstones flashing on their necks, all seated in orderly rows in their bright red-and-yellow patterned shifts. Their legs swung briskly under the chairs, and the long tables reminded Rod incongruously of mealtimes at the Guard Academy.

Soon the bowls of four-eyes stew came passing down, with red and green loop-fruits the boys had cooked up from the garden. Since Rod could not yet eat them, Chae brought him his two cakes of standard-grade food from the synthesizer. The synthesizer reshaped organic matter at the molecular level and filtered out toxic metals. An economy model, it put out two flavors, fruit or flesh; Rod had eaten them for so long that he forgot which was which. But the first bite reminded him he was famished. He ate quickly, forgetting his usual insistence on “civilized” conversation.

Someone was kicking him beneath the table. It was T’kun, managing to eat with his left arm. “T’kun, remember your manners,” Rod warned. “The Spirit is watching.”

A commotion erupted at the far end. A helicoid asleep on the ceiling apparently had fallen onto someone’s plate. The children were shrieking; Mother Artemis calmed them, while Rod released the helicoid outdoors. Looking upward, he saw two more helicoids hanging by their suckers from the rafters, their propeller rings turning idly. The hall really needed cleaning out.

Returning to his place, he found that T’kun had crawled under the table because he did not like the pudding for dessert.

“Come out and sit down,” Rod warned, slightly raising his voice.

T’kun dutifully emerged. “I am sitting down.”

Mother Artemis came over and leaned by his ear. “Rod, I’ve just heard from Station. Patella can’t recover here—he must ship back to Elysium.”

His last hope died. There was nothing they could do for the injured sentient except ship him back home. Poor Patella. “What will we do?” he whispered. It was hard enough with just the two of them managing here, until Geode brought the babies home; but even then, they needed a doctor. It would take some searching to find either a sentient willing to come, or a human physician willing to be lifeshaped, with two years in the gene tank before she or he dared set foot here without a skinsuit.

Mother Artemis said, “The Reverend Father will find someone.” The Most Reverend Father of Dolomoth, a large Valan congregation, had founded their colony and was ultimately responsible for it. “Meanwhile, I could take on a medicine module. It would overload my processor somewhat and slow my reactions, but—”

Rod shook his head. “You can’t do that. You have to keep alert around here—you don’t want to...to get hurt like Patella.”

Mother Artemis thought a moment. “There’s always Sarai.”

Sarai was a Sharer lifeshaper. Sharers were a human race who had settled the ocean world of Elysium ten millennia before the “immortals” did, shaping their own genes for aquatic life. Sarai, however, was a rebel among her kind. She had left her ocean home for Prokaryon, to dwell deep within the rock of Mount Anaeon. Rod frowned. “Sarai is hard enough to reach.” And not usually receptive to visitors.

“Sarai is as skilled as any Elysian doctor, and she would help the children.” Mother Artemis added thoughtfully, “More contact with fellow humans will be good for Sarai.”

Rod prayed the children stayed well.

Commotion erupted again, this time from Pima and Pomu, who were attempting to rise from the table. Under the table T’kun had tied their shoelaces together.

After dinner everyone gathered outside. The sun was just setting beyond the distant singing-trees. The llamas groaned at the sun, their regular habit in the evening.

Mother Artemis stood, and her nanoplastic hair waved above her head as if charged by an electrical storm. She spread her robe, and her skirts came alive with bears and lions. Strange story figures shimmered and stepped out around her; the nearer children tucked in their feet and hitched back a bit. The colors deepened to violet, in waving shades of water. Suddenly out leaped a wonderful flying fish. The fish spread its fanlike wings, and began to speak in an otherworldly voice, telling the Sharer tale of how the first fish came to fly, and why their souls were haunted, never again to rest at peace in the sea.

The children were spellbound through tale after tale, legends from Valedon and Urulan and every known world, until at last the younger ones dozed off. Rod put the twins to bed, and Haemum took T’kun. The sun was down now, but the soft remains of light diffused through the gathering clouds. A light rain was falling, as it nearly always did at this hour, as if Prokaryon’s “hidden masters” were in charge. The smell of ginger increased as the soil released its fragrance. The voice of the distant singing-trees abated.

Rod was dead tired, but somehow his mind would not yet let him sleep. He strode restlessly outside the compound, letting the raindrops cool his face and sink into his robe.

He found Mother Artemis walking with him. “How was L’li?”

There was too much inside him to tell. The very edge of certain thoughts made his stomach contract. “Those who had money still have it. But some have the creeping, too—and the cure does not work on advanced cases.”

“Yes,” she nodded, her darkened robe swishing. “But you did not spend your time among the rich.”

“The lightcraft are still running; for how much longer, I don’t know. A power blackout downed several. Next time I may not even be able to reach Reyo.”

She nodded again. To the east the clouds parted, revealing a large red moon whose glow filled Mother Artemis’s restless snakes of hair. The moon glowed red from the sentients melting out its iron for the insatiable factories of Valedon. Prokaryon’s moon had no known life, and by the next decade it would be mined down to nothing.

“The village I visited last year is deserted now,” Rod continued. “The hill I climbed this year will be empty next year.”

Mother Artemis kept walking.

“I gave the beggars what bread I had.”

“I’m sure you gave them everything.”

“My watch, and my leftover credits.” The colony’s own cash was scarce. “But not my pocket holostage,” he added remorsefully. “They could have sold that.”

“They could,” she agreed. “Was that the worst thing?”

His stomach tightened unbearably. “There was a woman outside the orphanage,” he forced himself to say. “She tried to make me take her baby.” He could not accept children of living parents, lest the government accuse him of ethnic abduction. “Otherwise, she said, she would take it to the market, rather than see it starve.” It was not a slave market.

Suddenly he retched, and his stomach finally gave up. “That was foolish,” he said, wiping his mouth, thinking of the wasted food. “I must get to sleep.”

“Yes, you must. Even though you want to go back and save all of L’li.”

“I do,” he said with a touch of anger, at the universe and at himself. “It’s appalling, and we all just—live here.”

“You saved six children this time; isn’t that a great privilege? How many people live their entire lives without saving one soul? And the Spirit should grant you a world?”

He stopped and looked closely at her. Was she laughing at him? “Yes,” he said, his mouth smiling despite himself, “the Spirit should grant me a world.”

At last, finishing his nightly meditation, Rod found himself in bed. Patella came to mind, and he missed him terribly. Then came the face of his father on Valedon, reproaching him: What did you do with all your expensive schooling, to join a bunch of clerics raising orphans at a distant star? Then nameless faces and hands arose until his mind cried out.

There was a tap at the door.

“Brother Rod?” It was T’kun. “My arm hurts.”

Rod pulled back the covers. T’kun was supposed to have outgrown sleeping in bed with him, but he would make an exception. The boy snuggled under the covers, his little head a miracle of softness. In an instant Rod was asleep.

THREE

The next day Rod awoke with a sore shoulder, a muscle pulled from hauling the giant tumbleround the day before. Nonetheless, he felt well rested, and the sight of the cloud-cloaked mountains always brought him peace. He spent the first hour with Gaea dragging herself after him and wrapping herself around his leg at every opportunity. The Spirit callers cared equally for all, but despite himself Rod had favorites.

Haemum and Chae rose early to go uphill and dig gravel out of the mine, an old stream bed rich in corundum. They sifted the gravel through water in a fine-mesh screen, allowing the denser crystals to sink to the bottom. Then they dumped each screen over onto a table, where the younger children sorted out the crystals. Most of them were clear and not of particular value, but a few were tinted blue, yellow, or even pink; the better ones, when cut, might fetch enough to feed the colony for a week. Even Gaea picked out her share, although most turned out to be quartz.

After the midday meal, Mother Artemis treated and cut the stones, training Haemum on the lap wheel. The younger children painted little dioramas of four-eyes and singing-trees, or strung necklaces of helicoid propeller shells. Rod and Chae worked on the garden, collecting ringed pods and fruits, and replanting the rows gouged out by the visiting tumbleround. In the western field the brokenhearts were ripening fast; how would they ever get them harvested without Patella?

Chae brought back a bushel full of greens to cook up four-eyes stew for the two tables of children, all swinging their feet and twirling the vegetable pods around their fingers. Afterward, as the little ones cleared up, Mother Artemis said, “I sent the Most Reverend Father a neutrinogram.” Neutrinos brought word across the space-time folds, resisting the extreme electromagnetic distortions at the connection holes. The signal was crude, never of holographic quality, but it was the fastest way. “I told the Most Reverend Father we need another brother or sister with medical training, at least until Patella returns.”

“What will we do in the meantime?” It could be weeks or months before help arrived.

Mother Artemis watched the nightly rain outside, her hair twining into knots and untwining again. “Haemum and Chae will help with the harvest. Between the two of them, now, they bring in as much as Patella did.”

Rod frowned, vaguely uneasy. “They are growing up.”

“Exactly.” She gave him a questioning look.

“Well—I guess I’ve been more on the infant end of things here. I’m not sure what the Reverend Father has in mind for the older ones, as they grow into adults.”

“When I was a nana in the shon, I raised Elysian children for Elysium. Now we raise Prokaryans. They’ll grow up to maintain the colony.”

“But they’re also citizens of the Free Fold.” He took a deep breath. “What if they choose to emigrate?”

She considered this. “If the Spirit so calls, so be it.”

“But how will they ever know enough? How will they know, without—education?”

“Education is the right of every citizen,” said Mother Artemis firmly. “We educate all our children. We meet the standards.”

“The formal standards are too low.” This was one area where Rod felt a disconcerting gap between human and sentient. “Human education takes years, even decades. We can’t just plug in a new module. When I was Haemum’s age, my father sent me to the Guard Academy. But it was more than soldiering—it was history, literature, mathematics.”

“And your father, was he pleased with the result?”

“He was horrified.” By leaving to follow the Spirit, Rod had dashed his father’s hopes of continuing the family tradition in the Guard. “That’s the point of education: to free a child to make choices that horrify her parents.”

“So, should we send Haemum to the Guard?”

Rod smiled at the thought. “No, but she can attend school by holostage. Who knows; she might become a doctor someday. Look at how she set T’kun’s arm.”

“I know those programs,” said Mother Artemis. “The better ones would take up most of her waking hours. But if it must be, so be it.” She looked up, and her hair stretched toward him. “You’re such a good father, Rod.”

Rod looked away, his face warm.

As the children napped or did lessons, Rod checked the holostage to see if he could reach Geode and ’jum, but he found a call waiting. “Return call,” he told the holostage.

“Which caller?” Servo machines were intentionally built to as low a sophistication as possible, to avoid the chance of their “waking up” sentient, in which case they had the right to earn freedom.

“Diorite.” Diorite was the shipping agent for Colonial Corundum, a firm that worked commercial deposits in the foothills. His form appeared on the holostage, tall and lanky, and tanned even darker than Rod. He wore a Valan talar, hung with strings of his pale green namestones, and a wide-brimmed hat for shade. “Rod, you’re back,” he exclaimed. “I heard about your brother. My sympathies—that ravine’s treacherous.”

Rod nodded. “Thanks.” He traced a six-point for blessing.

“Why didn’t you call me? We could have brought Reverend Mother home, and had your brother up to Station in no time.”

That was generous; Rod would never have asked such a favor. “Thanks, I’ll remember.”

“Anytime. Say, I see your old craft’s still out there—you’ll be shipping back soon?”

“I left six new children at the clinic. Besides, I have a load to ship.” There was a sizable cargo of sapphires for Valedon, plus the craft items the children made for tourists.

“You can help us out,” said Diorite. “A small package to deliver—the usual terms.”

The Spirit Colony was exempt from the costly regulations and reporting requirements for commercial mining. When Diorite had new samples whose contents he did not want known to competitors, he asked Rod to take them up, for a small “donation” which greatly helped the colony. It was legal, and Mother Artemis said they ought to trust good neighbors. “Meet us in the morning,” Rod agreed.

“Sure thing. Good luck to your new colonists.”

In the morning Haemum and Chae strapped up five of the llamas, a broad-footed breed lifeshaped for Prokaryon. Strapping them up was tricky, for as soon as the beasts felt a heavy load they would empty their guts with streams of spit. Once harnessed, the llamas lumbered dutifully down the trail through the brokenhearts, then turned off into the treacherous wheelgrass, bleating in protest.

The old servo lightcraft was still stuck out in the wheelgrass where Rod had left it. Beside it now sat Diorite’s own sleek sentient craft, its rectennas mirror-smooth. Strains of popular music emanated from within, at rather high volume. As Rod approached, the music stopped, and Diorite emerged, shaking his head. “Sorry about that—Dimwit here has limited taste.”

“I heard that,” called the lightcraft. “Limited taste, indeed. Just you wait—only six point eight months till I draw a salary.”

“Sentients,” muttered Diorite. “Can’t live with the dimwits, and can’t live without ’em.”

Rod smiled. “I’ll trade you the llamas any day.” Haemum fed a treat to each of the beasts. They stood there, chewing sideways.

“Well, here’s the package.” Diorite caught Rod’s arm, and his voice sank to a whisper. “Just between us Valans—look what we found.” He opened his hand beneath Rod’s eyes. Between his fingers glinted a ruby, one of the largest and deepest Rod had ever seen. His father had worn such, and so had the Academy Master, whose namestones had glared fire at Rod too often.

A low chuckle escaped Diorite. “There’s more where that came from—and I’m the only man who knows where.”

Rod smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “No Valan will forget his name if you can help it.” He stowed Diorite’s package carefully in his old lightcraft, while Haemum and Chae helped transfer their crates from the cart. As they worked, Diorite’s lightcraft lifted off. The hiss of boiling air shattered the morning calm, startling a flock of helicoids. Upward it soared, then a lateral burst of plasma sent it streaking across the sky.

Haemum said wistfully, “I wish I could come with you.”

Rod smoothed her curls and kissed her forehead; it seemed only yesterday, she’d been Gaea’s age. “I could use your help,” he admitted, “but the colony’s short-handed.” And now he had to find her a school.

“Will Brother Patella come home?”

“If the Spirit wills. But not for a while.”

The old lightcraft soon left Prokaryon behind, the stripes of singing-tree forest and wheelgrass fading into the continent Spirilla, where most of the colonists had settled. Spirilla had the shape of an S, its mountain range rising out of its northern curve, while its southern curve cupped the crater from an asteroid that had fallen some hundred million years before. The continent rotated out of view as the great ocean came round, then continents and oceans blurred together, leaving the planet a bright jewel set in the black of space.

At Station, Rod docked and hoisted up his cargo, including Diorite’s package. All surfaces had to be cleansed by mite-sized servos that removed traces of arsenic and toxic proteins. Afterward, the ship would head off to the first extradimensional space fold, where it would “jump” several light-years. Three jumps later, it would reach the star system of Elysium and Valedon. On Valedon, the gems were always in demand for namestones. The crafts would sell better on Elysium, whose millennial inhabitants in their floating cities admired anything handmade.

While the cargo was processed, Rod hurried off to the clinic. He found Geode feeding two infants while changing a third.

“Brother, am I glad to see you.” Geode’s eyestalks twined in delight, and he extended his furry red arm around Rod. “You would be quite worn-out with those little ones. Even I need an extra recharge.”

“You’ve done well, I see.” Rod picked up the youngest girl, T’kela. Less than a week old when he first picked her up in Reyo, she still fit comfortably in one hand. Her own wrinkled hands squirmed at odd angles, and her face had a preternaturally wizened look. She stared at Rod’s face, then fell asleep, her arms still sticking out straight from the blanket. Rod put her up to his shoulder. The magic of such a tiny person always took him by surprise.

The two older ones were crawling and pulling themselves up to stand. Now that they were well fed, they acted more like toddlers than the infants the orphanage had claimed. That could mean extra costs for lifeshaping—one “older child” was bad enough.

’jum was at the holostage, observing a stellated geometric solid that hovered insubstantially before her. She caught sight of Rod and stared, then came over and squeezed his hand, digging in with her fingers as if to assure herself he was really there. Her face glowed with health, her cheeks already filling out so that he might barely have known her. Rod imagined the millions of nanoservos swarming through her veins, to clear her prions and process her genes for Prokaryon.

“Hello, ’jum,” said Rod. “Found any interesting numbers lately?”

The girl only stared.

“Don’t let her fool you,” said Geode. “She can talk, all right. Say, ’jum, did you count the corners on that solid yet?”

’jum swallowed to speak. “Twelve corners pointing out, eighty pointing in. And one hundred eighty faces.”

Geode groaned. “You’ve got the algorithm, all right. Hey you,” he called to the holostage, “show us an extra dimension, will you.”

“Please specify request,” the holostage replied in a flat tone.

“A four-dimensional geometric solid, Dimwit.”

Rod frowned. “Brother, don’t talk like the miners.”

“You’re right,” Geode replied contritely, hunching his arms. “Let us pray for mindless machines, that they be granted souls. Well, the babies are making excellent time,” he told Rod. “The youngest one is taking up nanoservos twice as fast as usual. All her cells are making arsenate pumps, and her liver is nearly transformed. She’ll be home within two weeks. I show them your holo image, and Mother Artemis, as often as possible,” said Geode, “so they’ll know you well. I show them Patella, too; I sure hope he gets home soon.” His eyestalks twined anxiously.

“What will we do without him?” Rod asked softly.

“Pray. Pray without ceasing.”

Rod picked the toddler Qumum up from the floor and tried to catch his gaze. After a minute Qumum suddenly smiled, a big smile with his mouth and eyes wide. Then he let out his breath with a trill. Rod laughed. “Here’s someone happy. Say, ’jum, how about you? Do you like your new room at Station?” Station would be her home for some months, perhaps longer.

’jum nodded, then looked away with a guarded expression.

“I’m sure you miss the blue sky.” Among other things.

’jum looked up suddenly. “Does the creeping ever reach the Children Star?”

Rod crouched to look into her face, catching her shoulders. “Never, ’jum. You will never be sick like that again.”

“There’s one good thing about Prokaryon,” Geode reflected. “None of their little creepy-crawlies can grow inside human bodies and make you sick. You’re as toxic to them as they are to you.”

Rod departed at last and checked that his cargo passed inspection. An hour remained for his one indulgence: supper at the Station lounge. It was a rare chance to be surrounded by adult humans again.

The lounge was built Elysian style, with rounded nooks that could expand or contract, and tables of nanoplast that shaped themselves to accommodate those who sat there. There was even a tree full of butterflies at the center, for Elysians to meditate. But most importantly, the tables actually served differentiated food. It was all reprocessed, of course, like the packets Rod’s instrument produced for his meals at the colony, but Station’s model could synthesize a thousand different food items, from filet of beef to flying fish.

First he had to find a seat. The bubble-shaped dining compartments seemed more crowded than usual with miners, surveyors, and researchers. Even two or three news reporters hovered overhead, shaped like snake eggs; some odd rumor must be up. Usually one of the nanoplastic walls would notice Rod and tunnel in to create a new space, but not today. Perhaps the dining hall had reached its volume limit. He paused uncertainly, brushing a whirr off his arm. The few that strayed out to Station seemed less picky about sustenance than those back home.

He saw a hand waving, next to an empty seat. The stranger motioned him to sit, removing her backpack from the chair across from her.

“Thanks,” he said. The woman, a simian student, looked vaguely familiar.

Rod sat down and placed his finger on a small window that read his fingerprint. Choosing what to order was always hard, all the more so since every minute that passed made him feel guilty for keeping himself from the colony. “Shepherd’s pie, with mixed greens.” His Valan home favorite.

The woman opened a pocket holostage to play the news from Elysium. Rod never watched the news at home, as it distracted from his prayers. Today’s story was on Prokaryon’s “hidden masters.” Giant tracks had appeared among the singing-trees, in a remote region west of Mount Helicon. Even on the holostage the “tracks” looked more like streambed erosion, but of course there were experts to claim otherwise. No wonder the “snake eggs” were about.

The tabletop opened, and a plate of steaming pie rose up. The odors brought him right back to his childhood; he could almost hear the gulls calling off Trollbone Point. The pleasure of the first few mouthfuls filled his attention, until the holostage again caught his eye. Another ship of illegals from L’li had tried to crash-land, this time on Elysium.

The hapless vessel hung forlornly above the Sharer ocean, in which the Elysian cities floated. Elysians had intercepted it, of course, and “repatriated” the passengers. Rod’s fork froze in his hand.

The woman was watching him. “You came from L’li, didn’t you?”

He recalled the simian student in the connector tube, staring down at him as he tried to keep a grip on the infants.

She closed the holostage and extended her hand. “I’m Khral, a microbiologist, just arrived from Science Park.” Science Park, the top Elysian research institute, sponsored fieldwork on Prokaryon. “I’ve joined the singing-tree project.”

“Welcome,” said Rod, shaking her hand. “I’m Brother Rhodonite, of the Sacred Order of the Spirit.”

“Oh yes! I’ve heard of Spirit Callers on Valedon. They do a ritual dance before the moon at midsummer.”

“That’s the ‘Spirit Brethren,’” Rod corrected, much annoyed. “They split off years ago.”

“I’m so sorry, I don’t know much about Valedon. I’m from Bronze Sky.” Bronze Sky, named for its vulcanic haze, had been terraformed four centuries before to settle excess L’liites. Today Bronze Sky was full, and there were twice as many L’liites as before—and Prokaryon was here to settle.

But Khral also showed ancestry from gorilla hybrids created as slaves on ancient Urulan. Her nose was pushed in with a wrinkle, and her heavy brow overhung her eyes, giving her a permanently serious expression. “You know, everyone gets wrong what I do, too. The students here avoid me. They think I’m here to find a plague, to give the Fold Council an excuse to terraform Prokaryon. But it’s not true.”

“No plague for us,” agreed Rod. “Prokaryan microbes cannot live in humans.”

Khral looked thoughtful. “That’s an interesting question. There are reports of occasional microzoöids isolated from human tissues—and even from nanoplast.”

“Microzoöids?”

“We call Prokaryan microbes ‘microzoöids’ because each cell is doughnut-shaped, just like the larger zoöids that roll across the fields. Each microzoöid cell runs its circular chromosome right around the doughnut hole! With their triplex DNA, microzoöids reproduce by splitting three ways down the middle, into three daughter cells.”

“Whatever their DNA, they can’t grow in us. We’re too...foreign.” Rod realized he knew nothing about it, only what the clinic had always told him.

Khral said, “The few microzoöids found in humans never grow in culture. But if they could exist for any length of time, just long enough to divide and copy their DNA, you’re bound to get mutants. And some day those mutants—”

“Let’s pray they don’t,” Rod exclaimed. “The last thing we need is an epidemic, with our doctor away.”

Khral laughed, and her large teeth showed, yet somehow she looked more human. “Never fear. Even our own microbes are mostly harmless, after all; they get a bad rap. But you shouldn’t be without a doctor. Doesn’t Station cover you?”

“Sure, but they can take days to show up. The mining camps offer a thousand shares of stock to recruit a doctor—we can’t match that. Patella came because he is a Spirit Caller. But he just had an accident...” He stopped himself. “We’ll manage. There’s a lifeshaper on Mount Anaeon that we can call.”

“A lifeshaper? You don’t mean the Sharer, Sarai?”

“You know her?”

“I’m trying to meet her. She’s one of the few people with data on microzoöids, most of it unpublished. She hasn’t yet returned my call.”

That was no surprise. “Sarai keeps to herself.”

“I would have lots to offer her—the latest strains and methods from Science Park.”

“If you’re not here to find a plague, what are you here for?” Rod asked.

“I told you—the singing-trees. Singing-trees are full of microzoöids.”

“They don’t look sick to me.”

“Neither do you—and your body carries ten times as many bacteria as human cells.”

Not exactly a comforting thought.

“And we exchange bacteria all the time, no matter how much we wash our hands. You can track the same bacteria strains in a family—in mom and dad, kids, even the family dog. You could say we ‘communicate’ through our bacteria.” She grinned excitedly. “That’s my theory: The singing-trees communicate by exchanging microzoöids. That’s why nobody’s made contact with them yet: Nobody’s looked at their microzoöids.”

So that was it, Rod thought, leaning back from the table. Yet another scheme to reveal “hidden masters.” “Station’s been pushing singing-trees for years,” he told her. “They’ve little to show for it.”

“It’s different this time; we’re really onto something. That’s why I’m here.”

Rod regarded her curiously. “Why are you scientists so anxious to find some high-IQ creature running Prokaryon? Why can’t you just let it be? If someone is in charge, they’ll show themselves once we prove worthy of their notice.”

“That’s just the point—how do we get their notice? If they’ve mainly studied our bacteria output ever since we got here, they must think we’re pretty dumb.”

That was hard to deny.

“I should think you’d be interested,” said Khral. “Without that last bit of doubt about ‘hidden masters,’ how long before we humans would blast Prokaryon open?”

Rod thought of the moon glowing red and shrinking by the year. A sense of unease crept up his neck. “The Secretary of the Free Fold would never allow that.”

“The Secretary’s mate is the president of Bank Helicon. Elysian banks don’t like ships of illegals. Bank Helicon wants to get Prokaryon developed—now, not centuries from now.”

He would have to run to make his launch time, he realized suddenly. His finger tapped the window; the plates descended as he got up, and a nanobug cleared the crumbs. “We will pray for the president of Bank Helicon.”

FOUR

On returning to the colony, Rod distributed a bag of sweets from the lounge. The children crowded around, then all but the twins and Gaea went off to the sapphire mine. Mother Artemis nursed the twins from two of her breasts, while Rod mended a strap of the llama’s harness and tried not to let his foot go to sleep in Gaea’s grasp. “Is it true,” he asked the Reverend Mother, “that the Elysians want to terraform Prokaryon?” He pulled the heavy needle through the thick tumbleround hide. He never had the heart to kill a tumbleround, but one that had died naturally provided enough cured hide for a year’s worth of harness straps and children’s shoes.

“Some would wish to terraform,” she said. “Too few humans can live here.”

“So, to fill our colonies faster, they would kill all this?” The singing-trees—the helicoids—so many creations, unique to this world.

“The Sharers won’t allow terraforming.” The Sharers had dwelt in Elysium’s ocean, long before the Elysians built their cities. “They have Elysium in their power. Their lifeshapers could easily make all the floating cities uninhabitable.”

Rod thought this over. “But it’s not only up to Elysium. The Free Fold—other worlds could vote to repeal the ban.”

“Secretary Verid will never allow it.” The Reverend Mother had worked closely with the Elysian leader Verid Anaeashon, years before, during the early sentient uprisings. Now Verid was Secretary of the Fold Council.

Pima and Pomu were scrambling down from the Reverend Mother’s lap. On her skirt a bear came alive and made faces at them; they hurried over to watch and laugh. The laughter of children was worth more than gold.

“For Haemum, I’ve checked out the New Reyo Branch of the Interworld Free School,” Mother Artemis told him. “Would it meet your requirements?”

“It’s a good start.” New Reyo was a larger L’liite colony on another continent, where the farming was better. The Spirit Callers had received a cheaper tract in Spirilla.

“She can enroll at any time. We’ll let her try it out and see.” There was a prayer answered. Mother Artemis added, “I’ve also been thinking of T’kun’s arm. We need to have it checked, to make sure the bone is healing straight.” She paused. “We’ll have to call Sarai.”

Rod tensed inwardly, but if the Reverend Mother had decided, so be it.

Their first call produced a stall of spattering light on the holostage. Perhaps Sarai had jinxed her connection again, to ward off offending callers. But after a few minutes, the connection held. The Sharer lifeshaper emerged from the surrounding vines of enzyme secretors and other leafy assistants, all native to the ocean world from whence she came. Her skin was smooth, hairless, and purple all over, from the symbiotic breathmicrobes that stored oxygen for swimming. The effect was especially striking since, according to the custom of her aquatic race, she wore no clothes.

“You share good timing, Sister.” Sarai’s webbed hand held up a large pear-shaped pod, one of the living instruments of her lifeshaping. “You’re just in time to see me commit genocide.”

“Good evening, Sarai,” said Mother Artemis, ignoring her remark. “My deep apologies for disrupting your work. Please help us. Brother Patella had a mishap and had to leave us, and now one of our children needs attention. If ever we can return assistance...”

Sarai plunged the pod into a vat of unknown liquid. “There—a billion microzoöids meet their death, that I may study their chromosomes. Who will sing their deathsong?”

“The Spirit Callers built a shrine for microbes,” Mother Artemis told her. “For all the microbes killed in the name of science.”

Sarai laughed. “I should have known.” She waved her hand, snapping her fingerwebs. “What’s your problem?”

Mother Artemis described the accident, and the boy’s condition.

Sarai listened. A long-legged clickfly perched on her head to cluck its message, then it flew off again. “Enough,” she said at last. “Bring the boy up tomorrow, and I’ll see him. But remember, if I’m in whitetrance, leave me alone.” The holostage went blank.

“That’s Sarai,” said Mother Artemis. “Once she sees the boy, she’ll treat him. And Sharers never take payment.” She turned to Rod. “What shape is the lightcraft in?”

“To land safely on a mountain? No way.” The realization sank in. He would have to travel a day down the zoöid-infested plain with a four-year-old with a broken arm, then cross a band of singing-tree forest, then hike another day up the glacial cliffs of Mount Anaeon, to reach the hanging valley where Sarai lived. Rod straightened himself and turned to her. “So be it. If you’re sure you can manage here on your own.”

“We’ll manage. You could take Gaea, too, you know; Patella and I were discussing it. It’s high time we fixed her spinal cord.” She paused. “It can’t hurt to ask.”

Rod was up at dawn to harness the llamas for the journey. Haemum had already fed them, and they groaned toward the rising sun. She packed their provisions, pulling the straps tight, and gave one beast a pat on the side. The llama’s head swayed on its long neck, its mouth a perpetual grin. Haemum looked longingly across at Rod. “I wish I could go with you.”

He clasped her shoulders. “Haemum, today you will journey much farther than Mount Anaeon. You’ll enroll in the New Reyo School. You’ll visit times and places none of us have ever seen.”

Instead of Haemum, Chae would go along to help T’kun, while Rod managed Gaea. The two boys appeared, having dressed and fed themselves. T’kun was still half-asleep with his thumb in his mouth, his arm in a fresh sling. Chae would ride one llama with T’kun behind him, while Rod rode the other with Gaea strapped to his back. Gaea was the last to be wakened, changed, and fed. The little girl beamed and clapped her hands at the sight of the llama. “Gaea go ride. Go ride, see zoöids.”

Rod silently called the Spirit to keep zoöids out of the way. At least the girl was starting out on her best behavior, for nothing pleased her more than to ride with her favorite parent all day.

“Here,” said Mother Artemis, giving him a map cube. “Even if the trail goes bad, you can’t lose your way.”

Their hands each traced the starsign, the invisible stars evaporating, yet they lingered in Rod’s heart. The llamas set off and paced down the trail into the wheelgrass, to the east, the opposite direction from where the craft from Station usually landed. Their specially-bred outsized feet made good time on the trail.

The air was still and clear; the distant singing-trees had not yet awoken, and the helicoids were just beginning to stir. A herd of a dozen four-eyes grazed peacefully to the east, each shape casting a long shadow back from the rising sun. The two eyes awake on top were faceted like rubies. Now and then one of the creatures rolled forward on its suction pads, extending the next of its four hungry mouths. At Rod’s back, Gaea stirred and stretched. “Zoöids,” she called softly.

Rod pulled the rope and called to Chae. “If anything big comes along, remember to freeze.” Humans neither looked nor smelled like food—unless they ran.

The llamas soon reached the shore of Fork River, so named because upstream the three major tributaries from the mountains met and fed into it. The water rolled wide and lazy, barely rippling through the loopleaves that drooped over the side from bushes at the edge. A long, dark hydrazoöid undulated beneath the ripples; its body was a torus extended into a tube. Its long fin spiraled around its girth, and it swam like a corkscrew.

Rod paused. Upstream, the trail was less well kept, and the river cut across several bands of singing-tree forest. He waited for Chae to catch up. Behind him Gaea stirred and stretched. “How are you getting on?” he called back to Chae.

“Just fine.” Chae traced a starsign.

From behind the ten-year-old, T’kun leaned outward and craned his neck forward. “Are we there yet?”

“Don’t be a baby,” said Chae. “We’ve barely started yet.”

They continued east, along the bank of the lazy river to their right. The mountains now rose straight ahead, their fog melting away, and the peak of Mount Anaeon stood clear. On the trail, wheelgrass had grown up in patches, the tall elastic double-stems sprouting loopleaves, each of which was a snare. The llamas picked their legs straight up and down, but still they would get their hooves caught. No wonder few Prokaryan creatures had evolved projecting limbs. Once Rod caught sight of a whirr-clouded tumbleround, with its long tendril loops stretched at all angles to the ground, like a discarded tire covered with cobwebs. Its penetrating odor reached his nose. Though harmless, somehow the sight of a tumbleround always made Rod’s hair stand on end.

The hollow voice of the singing-trees arose now, in waves that grew and quieted again. The tones deepened, reverberating even through the ground below. Ahead of the travelers the dense band of forest emerged and grew, resolving into deep violet singing-trees. The singing-trees rose in enormous arches, several times taller than the colony dwellings. Between each pair of “trunks” in the arch, the lower sector dipped into the ground to thrust double-roots deep into the soil. From the top branched multiple arches, sprouting loopleaves. The uppermost arches were flattened into stiff plates narrowly spaced together; these vibrated at the slightest hint of wind, “singing.”

As the llamas entered the forest, the air cooled markedly, and the path lay free of wheelgrass. The upper canopy cut off most of the light, except for occasional shafts from above as if through a window. The dark arches created the atmosphere of a temple; one could well believe the planet’s rulers dwelt here. As the wind lessened and the songs quieted, smaller zoöids could be heard rustling unseen. The river brooded beside them, furtive creatures slipping into its depths.

Rod stopped for water. The llamas waded into the river, while he filtered some for the children. Out of the corner of his eye Rod saw something fall from a singing-tree. A little shriek broke the calm, followed by scuffling sounds. The shriek repeated, fading slowly. Curious, Rod took a step forward to look beyond through the arch of the tree. A hoopsnake had caught a smaller zoöid in its loop, then twisted into a figure eight to strangle it. It might take a while, especially if the prey had four lung systems, as a four-eyes did. But in the end the hoopsnake would have a meal to suck the juice from.

Chae came over and caught Rod’s hand. “Brother Rod, shouldn’t we save it?”

He meant the little one, Rod realized. “That’s nature, Chae. You wouldn’t want the whole forest overrun with zoöids.” He scanned the canopy, wondering what larger denizens might perhaps take aim at them. But only another hoopsnake wound itself along a branch.

As they rode deeper into the forest, the singing-trees grew larger, and their voices swelled till they drowned his own. At one point the trail headed straight under the arch of a giant, perhaps a thousand years old. Were the “masters” really watching, as Khral had said? If so, they gave no sign. At last the trees began to thin out, and the ground became more sodden, sprouting orange loops of ring-fungus. Stagnant pools appeared, full of slime, and oddly flattened helicoids whirled along the surface.

The travelers emerged into the next band of wheelgrass. Blinking in the sun, Rod scanned the horizon. Mount Anaeon rose larger than before; but just ahead, the wheelgrass was full of four-eyes. Hundreds of the creatures pressed together at the riverside. These four-eyes were blue-and-brown-striped, and larger than the breed he saw close to home.

“We don’t want to get caught in that herd,” he told Chae. Reluctantly he turned away from the river, hoping to get around the herd without losing too much time. There were four-eyes of every age, including paler young ones, and parents with a baby firmly seated in the inner hole, where it would feed on special polyps that grew on the parent’s hide. One pair were actually coupling together, like two stacked donuts, each extending its germ cell donors into the receptacles of the other.

As the travelers were coming around the herd, a commotion erupted, nearer the river. The four-eyes started to roll, forward in one direction, then suddenly backward. Back and forth they zigzagged, the wheelgrass springing up behind them, their pungent alarm hormones filling the air. Then the ground rumbled, vibrating with the weight of some very heavy object coming near.

From across the plain rolled a megazoöid, one of the largest that Rod had ever seen, like an elephant doubled over. Four-eyes scattered before it, except for the unlucky ones who ended up in the giant’s path. Two more of the megazoöids appeared, surprisingly fast once they gathered momentum. They seemed to be trying to trap the four-eyes by the river.

“Watch out!” shouted Chae behind him. “Freeze!” The boy pulled his mount to stop.

In that instant Rod realized that he had told Chae to do absolutely the worst thing. He pulled his own mount around and rode back to the boy. “Run for it,” he shouted. “Or the herd will run us down.” He slapped Chae’s llama on the rump and sent him pacing, and prayed that T’kun could hold on. Then he followed, dodging the frantic four-eyes that already were charging into their path. His own llama stumbled once in the loopleaves. The dust and the powerful scent had him choking and his eyes streaming. Rod thought he would never get out alive.

At last he broke free of the herd. Ahead rose the next band of singing-trees. But where were Chae and T’kun? For a few agonizing minutes, he was convinced the boys lay trampled beneath the stampeding four-eyes. Then he saw the llama, standing still, with one rider.

In an instant he was at their side. Chae was seated on the llama, dazed, while T’kun lay crying on the ground where he must have fallen off. Rod helped him up and checked out the little boy’s limbs as best he could.

“You said to freeze,” Chae whimpered.

“I was wrong. But you did well, Chae.” Rod inspected T’kun’s cast, which was intact. “You saved your brother’s life.”

“I want to go home now.”

Soon Gaea’s wailing joined the chorus.

In the distance, several giant megazoöids gathered to suck the guts out of all the squashed four-eyes. One of the giants had an offspring attached snugly inside its donut hole, eating the polyps off its parent.

The travelers at last camped for the night at the edge of the singing-trees, by the river. Rod pulled a piece of solar nanoplast off his pack where it had charged all day, then he gathered it into a lump and set it glowing. Chae caught a hydrazoöid to fry; Rod thought it looked and smelled like a rubber hose, but the children devoured it. Far above in the canopy, light flashes streaked between the luminescent loopleaves in hues of yellow, green, and blue. The light show, even more than the “singing” of the singing-trees, attracted scientists in search of hidden masters.

Rod set out a nanoplastic tent stick, which promptly shaped itself into a shelter. Already the nightly drizzle was falling. The wind came up, and the trees keened so loudly that he thought he would never sleep. But he was dead tired, and, with his arms across the three of them, the night passed.

He awoke to hear Chae screaming. “Help! We’re trapped!”

Still half-asleep, Rod tried to extricate himself from his sleeping bag. His limbs were sore from the hard ground, and besides there were long filaments of some sort stretched out like a curtain over him and the children. He yanked the filaments out and tried to stand. The smell of glue was overpowering, and whirrs buzzed deafeningly around his head. Something huge towered over him—

It was a tumbleround. There was no mistaking its filaments and the whirrs swarming over its stinking hide.

Rod lost no time extricating the children and as much of their camping gear as they could salvage. The llamas remained tethered nearby, feeding placidly as if the commotion was nothing to them. The tumbleround itself made no sound or rapid movement. It had no eyes, or ears; so the scientists said. It must have been rooted nearby, near enough to migrate gradually over during the night. But why? Did it need some essential nutrient from the human bodies? Or did it seek something deeper?

“Who are you?” Rod demanded aloud. “What do you want from us?” Hearing himself, he felt foolish. But it was odd how the tumbleround had migrated exactly to the point where the human travelers lay—and no farther. It could have crushed them, or sucked them dry, but instead all it wanted was...a touch? A look in at the window?

They saddled the llamas, Rod taking one last look backward at their nocturnal visitor. Perhaps Sarai might know more about tumblerounds.

Now the trail grew much steeper, for this stretch of forest extended onto the foot of Mount Anaeon, where the bands of “controlled” habitat at last gave out. Here was where the true wilderness began; where even the weather might be unpredictable, where flora and fauna seemed to obey no master save the creator of the universe.

The travelers approached the fork of Fork River, where Mother Artemis’s holographic map led them up the steepest of the three tributaries. Now the water was rushing swiftly, gurgling, eddying around stones worn smooth. The trail continued along the left bank, rising ever higher above the stream itself. There stretched a vast U-shaped valley between Mount Anaeon and Mount Helicon, carved by a long-departed glacier. Now in the valley grew singing-trees even taller than those on the plain. The rising mountainside became so steep that to his right Rod looked down upon the tops of the singing-trees, while to his left, where the trailblazers had blasted through, the root systems of trees were exposed, their double-roots clinging to rocks about to fall at any moment. From far below in the valley the roar of the stream echoed upward.

Then the singing-trees shrank and thinned out, replaced by bushes of tough loopleaves, full of scarlet and golden flowers that cascaded hundreds of meters down toward the river. Above jutted rocks like the teeth of dead giants. At one point the rocks had broken and slid down onto the trail, where the llamas had to pick their way painfully across. The sun was rising, but the air grew cold. On the cliffs above clung diamond-shaped patches of snow.

A bend around the mountain, and there it was: the waterfall. Millions of tongues of foam falling, falling forever to the Fork River tributary below, from a hanging valley cut off by the ancient glacier. The waters roared on, sending billows of mist upward. Above the falls piled layers of stone, up to the snow-covered peaks.

Rod’s map box chirped at him. Inside the box, the bright line took a turn off the trail, somewhere near here. Sure enough, there appeared a footpath, half-overgrown with bushes that made wheelgrass seem like a paved road. Undaunted, the travelers took the side path, heading down toward the midst of the waterfall.

Now he remembered. There would be a hole in the mountain, an opening to a tunnel behind the waterfall which powered Sarai’s laboratory. “It’s all right, keep up,” he urged Chae, who hung back, reluctant to get soaked in the mist from the falls.

Rod dismounted, and bade Chae do likewise while they felt their way. At their left, they met sudden darkness.

An invisible cavity seemed to open. The llamas stumbled into the dark, whining in complaint. Gaea whimpered, and Rod took her out of the pack to comfort her. As his eyes adjusted, patches of green light glimmered, revealing a low ceiling. They were plants that glowed in the dark, plants with real leaves—Sharer plants.

A large long-legged insect swirled about their heads, making a clicking noise. It was a clickfly. The Sharer insect veered back down the tunnel, whose ceiling bristled with dog-tooth calcite crystals as big as Rod’s thumb. “It’s a messenger,” Rod told Chae. “Let’s follow it.”

Suddenly the cavern filled with light.

“Messenger indeed.” Sarai appeared, several clickflies perched on her scalp and arms. Smoothly purple from head to toe, she had not a stitch on; Rod felt embarrassed, for he had forgotten to warn the children. But Sharers somehow look clothed enough as they are. Sarai added, “I’ve had reports of you for the past half hour, driving those miserable beasts of yours across the rocks.”

Rod sketched a star. “Thanks so much for seeing us.” He introduced the children. “T’kun is the one you need to see. We are forever in your debt.”

Sarai flexed her fingerwebs, and a clickfly flew off. “Bother all that.” She eyed him sharply. “It’s the one in your arms I need to see. What lamentable shape she’s in. Child abuse.”

Rod held Gaea tighter. “She needs help, too,” he admitted.

Sarai turned and headed down the tunnel. “I don’t know,” she muttered, “I just don’t know about you clerics. Raising children you can’t afford.” Her scalp had a fine down of hair, suggesting a Valan ancestor back a generation or two. She led them to a chamber full of tangled vines, like a greenhouse. She gestured at T’kun to sit here, and Gaea there. The vines sneaked over and twined around each of them unnervingly; undomesticated varieties could be carnivorous.

Rod patted their shoulders gently. “Sit very still.” These vines, lifeshaped for their task, would sample minute traces of their tissues and body fluids. The children kept still, as if awed by their strange surroundings, their wide eyes casting around them.

Sarai flicked her webbed hand at Chae, and she pointed to a bowl of fruit. “Eat something; you’re too small for your age.”

The messenger insect hovered above T’kun, watching. It nestled among the vines for a while, then it went to the ceiling, where it started to weave an intricate web. Sarai watched the web intently as it grew.

“The boy is full of bruises,” Sarai announced. “What have you done to him?”

Rod’s hands clenched. “The journey is not easy, as you know. He could only hold on with one arm.”

“His bone is fine,” she announced. “The bruises will also be fine.”

Rod let out a long sigh. “Thanks so much. We won’t trouble you any further.”

“The girl will take me longer.”

He blinked. “You mean—you can help her?”

Sarai fed a bit of what smelled like fish to her vines. “She needs to regenerate her spinal cord.” Sarai nodded toward a particularly large vine straggling over the wall, whose blooms spanned the length of his arm. “She’ll hatch from the bud in about a month.”

His heart overflowed with hope, then turned cold. He watched Gaea, as Sarai’s meaning sank in. Gaea must have sensed it, for suddenly she pulled out the vines and dragged herself over the floor to his feet.

“A month...here?” he repeated. “Inside a...flower?” Of a carnivorous plant? He wanted to snatch the child back.

“From the chest down. Well, what do you want? Why didn’t you get her here sooner? Machines and ignorant clerics, raising infants—there ought to be a law.”

“You didn’t answer our calls,” Rod snapped. “What do you know of children, holed up alone on this damned mountain?”

“Bro-der Rod,” Gaea’s voice quavered. “Gaea go home now.”

Sarai was chuckling as she rearranged her scattered vines. “So the Spirit Caller has a temper. Well, well. Should I treat every impoverished infant in the Fold? Even my Sharer sisters let the Elysians drag the L’liite ships off Shora,” she observed, using the ancient Sharer word for their home world.

“Better one than none.” Rod took Gaea up in his arms. This ocean has no shore...the Spirit should grant me a world.

“Let them come here, then,” said Sarai. “Let them find me.

“They try. A new student from Science Park tried to reach you.”

“‘Hidden masters’ again,” she replied with contempt. “They call themselves scientists, yet all they want to prove is that some great father rules the world after all.”

“Do you think the singing-trees communicate?” he asked suddenly. “What about tumblerounds?”

Sarai froze still. Her inner eyelids came down like pearls. They protected Sharers’ eyes underwater, but Sarai used them to hide her inner thoughts. “Why should I share my data?”

“Go home now,” insisted Gaea.

Rod held the child tight, sickened by what he had to do. “Gaea, you’ll have new legs when you come home.”

FIVE

The return journey was easier, yet infinitely harder, for he could only wonder how Gaea fared after her last shrieking farewell. At home, Mother Artemis assured him that he had done the right thing. “I knew Sarai would help,” said Mother Artemis, “once she saw the dear little girl in front of her. When the Spirit offers, do not question.”

Haemum, now, was brimming with excitement at her new school. “‘There are all kinds of worlds to see!’” She worked with Rod in the garden, pulling out double-root weeds that clung like steel wire. “You can dive right into the ocean, or climb to the top of a volcano on Bronze Sky—the ground shakes when it erupts. You can learn how all the planets were made, how the rock flows under and over inside them. Some of them even have ‘weather’ that changes every day—did you know it can rain in the daytime? And then you can see a rainbow stretch across the sky!”

“Imagine—a rainbow.” Rod looked up from the garden with a smile. There was no magic like a young person’s first taste of the world.

“You can meet Fold Friends, too.” Haemum had brushed her curls neatly, and her voice had a new lilt in it. “Children from all different cultures. Even Elysian children in their fabulous shon. But of course, the most noble culture of all is that of our own L’liite people.” That was a line from her New Reyo teachers. “Our little ones should have more lessons, too, you know. Children belong in school eight hours a day.”

“We’ll see about that.” For the little ones, actually, Rod thought Mother Artemis’s lessons more effective than the school days he recalled. “What time in the morning are you due in class?”

“Homeroom starts at seven.”

“Let’s head out at dawn, first, to bag some four-eyes. Our meat supply is getting low.”

In the morning, as the sun peeked out between Mount Helicon and Mount Anaeon, Rod and Haemum rode south through the brokenhearts to hunt four-eyes. Bullets were of little use against zoöids; a four-eyes shot in one stomach would simply roll off and make do with three. Megazoöids did the same, as early explorers had learned the hard way. Lasers worked better, for a zoöid sliced clean through was stopped in its tracks. But lasers could start a fire, inducing a thunderstorm to put it out. How the planet managed this, no one knew.

What worked best was poison. Because Prokaryan biochemistry was so alien, a poison dart that killed four-eyes had no effect on humans consuming the meat. So Rod and Haemum rode up slowly toward the herd, singling out stragglers. Silently he mouthed a prayer to the spirits of the creatures whose bodies would give them food.

The four-eyes did not seem to recognize humans as a threat, either by sight or by smell, and appeared too stupid to learn. Not high on the list of candidates for “masters,” Rod thought as he aimed his dart gun.

The zoöid rolled off immediately, then zigzagged twice. Within a minute, it wobbled and fell. Rod and Haemum picked off half a dozen thus, then dragged the bodies some distance away to prevent the herd from running them over. By then the stomachs of the dead zoöids had emptied out, a last reflex. The air filled with a smell worse than skunk. It did make them easier to clean later, Rod thought as he hoisted the carcasses onto the backs of the llamas.

The rest of the morning Rod spent at the gravel pit with Pima and Pomu, training them to sort sapphires. When they returned, Diorite was at the door with Mother Artemis. He made the starsign for Rod. “Good to see you, Brother. As I told the Reverend Mother, I’ve brought a helping hand for your harvest.”

Beside him stood an earth-digging machine. “He’s called Feldspar, and he’s a loyal member of our crew. He could use a break from us, though; most of our crew are a hard-living lot, whereas Feldspar likes to read ancient literature and watch plants grow. His nanoplast reshapes for threshing and harvesting. He doesn’t care for human speech, but he’ll do the job.”

“Feldspar says he’s very happy to be here,” Mother Artemis agreed. “What a lovely idea, Diorite; you’ve certainly made miracles come true. And we’ll be glad to confirm your tax write-off.”

“Thanks, Diorite.” Rod was taken aback, for they had never accepted quite so great a favor before.

“It’s our pleasure,” the miner said. “After all, Spirit Callers bring good luck.”

“I hope your business is doing well.”

“Actually, we could use all the luck we can get just now.” Diorite wiped his face with his hand. “The takeover, you know.”

Rod never quite kept straight who owned which of the mining firms. “I thought you were already a division of Hyalite Nanotech.”

Diorite’s eyes widened. “Didn’t you hear? Hyalite itself just got taken over.”

“By whom?”

“Proteus.”

Proteus Unlimited. Even Rod had heard of Proteus Unlimited, a servo firm that doubled in sales every year. “Is that so bad?”

“Is that bad?” Diorite’s voice fell to a whisper. “Proteus Unlimited makes sentient-proof servos. They invented a training process that keeps servos asleep forever, even giant ones the size of a small moon. Imagine it: a moon at your beck and call.”

“I can imagine.”

“An Elysian runs the firm, Nibur Letheshon. When Nibur buys a new company, it doesn’t just keep humming; it gets swallowed up into Proteus, all its operations redirected to make servos. Most of Hyalite makes servos already; the old-fashioned kind that can ‘wake up’ and buy their way out. But no more. All Nibur will want of my division is the mining rights to sites rich in lanthanides. You’ll see.”

Rod doubted it would make much difference to the Spirit Colony which firms traded what, so long as the limits were enforced. But for Diorite it would be a tense time. “Let’s hope they keep you on; you turn a good profit. We’ll keep you in our prayers.”

After Diorite had left, Mother Artemis said, “We have word from the Reverend Father. I saved the neutrinogram.”

The image quality of a neutrinogram was limited to a snowy monochrome in two dimensions. The snow coalesced into a hooded face with a long gray beard. It was the Most Reverend Father of the Congregation of Dolomoth.

“The Spirit be with you, Reverend Mother Artemis, Brother Geode, and Brother Rhodonite,” said the Most Reverend Father. “All our sympathy pours out for you, on the occasion of Brother Patella’s misfortune. We call on the Spirit to make Brother Patella whole again, and to give you all strength in your sacred mission. As you know, Brothers and Sisters, the ways of the Spirit are infinitely mysterious, even to those of us who have called for many decades. Our hearts move for you. And yet, hard as our mortal spirits cry out, it would seem that all of our brethren at present are called upon elsewhere. Be sure that we will hold you up to the Spirit in our hearts, inspired by your selfless mission...” The message ended, fading into snow.

Rod listened closely. He turned to the Reverend Mother, who would obey the Reverend Father, just as Rod obeyed her. Outward obedience brought spiritual freedom.

In this case, however, it sounded like the Reverend Father had no one else to send; and their instruction was unclear. Mother Artemis considered in silence, her snakes of hair twining among themselves. “For now,” she said, “we’ll depend on Sarai. Someday we might send Haemum to apprentice with her.”

Rod swallowed hard. It was not right, he thought suddenly, that neither the Fold nor the Reverend Father could provide medical care. But then, who could care for all of L’li?

“Rod, there’s something else, I’m afraid. Geode says one of our new children is having trouble.”

They conferred with Geode on the holostage. “That ’jum wouldn’t take her treatments today,” the sentient told them.

Rod frowned. “Did the treatment hurt? Was she handled gently?”

“It makes her a bit sick, you can’t help that. When the medic insisted, would you believe she threw a stone at him.”

Rod realized that he had no idea of ’jum’s previous background on L’li. He knew Geode would be thinking, what could you expect of an older child?

Mother Artemis asked, “Wherever would she find stones?”

“Her pockets were full of them when she arrived.” The sentient waved his two red arms overhead. “At first we let her keep them, as her only keepsake, after all. I’ve taken them away now, but she manages to squirrel away odd bolts and brackets anyhow.”

Rod said, “Let me talk with her.”

’jum appeared on the holostage. Her face had filled out, but her eyes were sullen and grim as on the first day he met her.

“I’m sad to hear this, ’jum,” Rod told her in L’liite. “I miss you very much. Why do you throw objects at the medic?”

“He’s stupid. They’re all stupid.”

Rod hesitated, not sure how to take this. The medical caterpillar would seem strange to her.

“You told me there would be no more ‘creeping,’” she accused.

Now he saw the problem. “There is no creeping, only treatments to make you well and help you grow. There’s a big difference.”

“I don’t feel well. I feel sick.”

If only Patella were here to explain; he always helped the children understand. Rod spoke again with Geode alone. “I could change places with you,” Rod offered. “The younger babies will be down soon, and they’ll need all your arms to hold them. Maybe ’jum will listen better to me.”

“Be my guest,” Geode replied with exasperation. “When she comes down, I suppose she’ll feel at home in the gem mine.”

So Rod called ahead to rent a ten-meter cube of living space at Station. Despite himself it occurred to him, at least he could have Valan food at Station. Love only truth, desire only grace, know only Spirit....

After dinner, the last Rod would share for a while, Mother Artemis spread her story-robes again. The air was transformed to water, the blue-purple of deep ocean with the sun peering murkily from above. An enormous giant squid rose majestically, its tentacles floating out over the gathered children, its round eyes mysteriously scanning the deep.

On the first world of the first mothers and fathers, in the first ocean there ever was, the creature of ten fingers swam down to the dwelling place of the great Architeuthis. And the ten-fingered one said to the ten tentacles, “Of all things great and fearsome, the greatest and most fearsome of all is the human being. I alone sail the skies, and I sell the stars. My machines plow the earth and build jeweled dwellings taller than mountains. I conquer all knowledge, and my progeny people all the worlds.”

Then Architeuthis replied, “Of all things deep and dreadful, the deepest and most dreaded am I. For I plumb the depths and devour the fallen. My tentacles consume whales and comb the abode of giant clams. I ruled the deep for eons before others crept upon land, and my being will outlast time...”

The squid contracted, propelling itself forward in a graceful arc across the night sky. A few tiny raindrops fell, as if genuine spray had emanated from its jet. Rod listened, strangely stirred. The story was sad, for the world of Architeuthis was long gone. Prokaryon’s own oceans had barely been tapped; yet who knew what beasts might dwell in the deep?

The next day Rod set off again in the old servo lightcraft. He still longed for word of Gaea, but Sarai had turned off her holostage.

At Station, Geode was all set to come home, with a couple of travel bags slung over his blue arms and tiny T’kela tucked securely in his bright red arm. The infant’s treatments had progressed enough for her to visit Prokaryon. It was always a thrilling moment to greet a new colonist, though Rod would miss the celebration for this one.

“Take care,” said Geode, his yellow arm sketching the starsign. “You’ll find that ’jum helps with the babies, but she refused her treatment for today. If she won’t see reason, the clinic will have to tranquilize her.”

“We’ll see.”

“One more thing—I found her a math program, and she spends practically all day on it. She especially likes number theory, power series, and Diophantine equations. Irrationals don’t hold her interest yet.”

“Well, she’s only six.” Haemum had said that all the children needed more school. What if they, too, had their own talents to be nurtured? The colony had to think about this.

Already Qumum caught his robe for attention, and a baby woke and cried, so he picked them up one in each arm, then went to the holostage. There stood ’jum, completely surrounded by equations of lighted letters hovering in air. Her hair was a pert bush of black curls, and she wore a red-and-yellow shift from Mother Artemis’s loom. Station let her wear it—her treatments must be going well.

“’jum?” he called to her. “It’s me, Brother Rod. I’ll be with you from now on. We’ll have some wonderful stories.”

’jum ignored him and went on pointing to this or that symbol, sometimes dragging one over from somewhere else. Rod watched her curiously, while he bounced the babies. At last he scanned the wall beside the holostage to find the emergency switch. With some difficulty he maneuvered over to the wall to get his hand just beneath the switch, just managing to press it without losing the baby. The lighted symbols all vanished.

Astonished, ’jum looked up. “Brother Rod? What happened?”

“The machine is done for now,” he told her. “It will work again, after you’ve had your treatment.”

Her eyes widened. Then they narrowed to slits, giving her the old sullen look again. Her hand went into her pocket where she kept the stones. She stopped, though, seeming to think better of it, and went off to the clinic.

For supper this time, he left early to make sure he and the children got a table to themselves. But as he was gulping forkfuls of shepherd’s pie, in between retrieving crawling babies, the new microbiologist came hurrying over to see him.

“Sarai said I could visit her!” exclaimed Khral. “Thank you so much for mentioning me.” She held her tray of food expectantly.

“You’re welcome.” As Rod introduced the children, the dining table extended for one more place.

“And this is Quark,” she added, glancing at her shoulder. There perched a nanoplastic eyespeaker. “Quark is our lightcraft.” At Rod’s look of puzzlement, she added, “The rest of him is docked outside Station.”

The round sentient eye swiveled in its clamp. “I’ve heard you like math, ’jum,” said Quark. “You ought to go to Science Park someday.”

Khral settled her tray, and patted the toddler seated next to her. “Quark will take me down to the planet tomorrow. We’re so excited!”

“Have you been lifeshaped already?” asked Rod.

“Of course not; I won’t live here forever, only to study for a year or two. I wear a skinsuit.”

A skinsuit required incredibly delicate servoregulation; the best models were actually sentient. The thin nanoplastic sheath fit itself snugly around one’s entire body, with an air filter at the mouth. It had to circulate air and water, while excluding any trace of dust, and stretched itself precisely as the wearer’s joints flexed. The young scientists who tramped across the Fold in third class used such expensive lab gear without a thought. They’d never be lifeshaped, like himself and Diorite, the real Prokaryans.

Quark said, “It’s surprising how little we know about microzoöids, especially since they caused so much trouble in the early days.” The first sentients to visit Prokaryon had gotten fouled up by microzoöids, but since then the redesigned nanoplast had few problems. If only human redesign were so easy.

“There’s no grant money in it,” Khral pointed out. “Singing-trees are sexier. But the veins of singing-trees are full of microzoöids. We’ll see what Sarai knows about them.”

Rod had a thought. “When you see Sarai, maybe you could check up on Gaea for me.”

“Why don’t you come with us?”

He thought it over. “I hope your lightcraft’s more precise than ours,” he said guardedly, thinking of the mountain target.

Quark said, “What do you take me for?”

“Of course.” Rod was embarrassed. “Well, I don’t know, with the children.”

Khral considered this. “Why not get a baby-sitter? I’ll ask around the lab....Elk Moon’s mate would help. He misses his folks on Bronze Sky; he’d be glad to play with babies for an afternoon.”

As promised, Quark landed them swiftly and cleanly on the trail just above Sarai’s cavern. “This is as close as I’ll get,” the sentient said. “I don’t think I’d fit on the ledge down there. But my eyespeaker will guide you.”

Khral’s skinsuit covered her like a film of plastic wrap, pressing down her hair and clothes. Her breath sucked hollowly through the mouth filter. With Quark’s eyespeaker on her shoulder, she skipped briskly down the lower trail.

“Okay, we’re getting close,” said Quark. At their left rose a sheer wall of black rock, with miniature rivulets trickling down; at their right fell the sheer drop to Fork River. Fog billowed in from the roaring waterfall.

Khral seemed to be walking farther than Rod recalled. Had they passed the entrance?

“That’s odd,” said Quark. “Something’s not right here.”

“Could we have missed it in the fog?” asked Khral.

Rod did not like the fog at all on this narrow ledge. “Let’s turn back.” He turned and walked slowly along the rock face, feeling his way. Suddenly the rock gave way, and he fell.

For an instant he thought he had fallen off the mountain. But no—he had fallen into the mountain, and not very far, just through the illusory rock face onto the floor of Sarai’s cavern.

“Oh!” Khral had tumbled in after him, and she caught his arm.

The plants lit up with their green glow. “You gave my clickflies no warning,” announced Sarai.

“Excuse us, please.” Khral looked around with interest.

“It’s an intelligence test.” Sarai leered at the eyespeaker.

Quark’s eye swiveled indignantly. “Well, I never—”

“We admire your work so much, Sarai,” said Khral.

Sarai gave Rod a worried look. “And what are you here for? More neglected children?”

“I came to see Gaea. How is she?”

“You don’t trust me,” Sarai muttered, while Rod repressed the impulse to agree out loud. She led them all down the calcite-studded corridor, clickflies swirling around her head.

There sat Gaea, inside a calyx of enormous green leaves that enclosed her tightly up to her chest. The leaves were attached below to a twisted stem as thick as Rod’s arm, which twined off into hidden recesses of the cavern. Not yet seeing him, the two-year-old watched openmouthed as a clickfly danced on a web just outside her reach. With her hands she batted at the bright webbing.

Once she did catch sight of him, she gave a shriek and stretched out both arms. Rod hurried over to hug and soothe her.

“If the stem breaks, she’ll die,” Sarai warned helpfully.

So Rod spent the next two hours entertaining Gaea, while Khral and Quark visited Sarai’s lab. They emerged talking excitedly about things he barely understood.

“Their chromosomes are triplex,” Khral was saying, “so of course when the micros replicate, they divide in three.”

“And they divide all the way around the torus,” added Sarai. “The chromosome encircles the central hole; so you have to end up with three daughter rings.”

Quark asked, “You have the enzymes and cell physiology all worked out?”

“And those other aromatic polymers, the ones that do light-activated quantum electrodynamics—Sarai, you’ve got to report this,” exclaimed Khral.

Sarai looked fierce again. “Those brainless legfish at Station—nobody will understand it.”

“You’re welcome to attend our next lab meeting,” Khral added. “Elk Moon will be summing up his latest work on singing-tree intelligence.”

“Singing-trees may harbor lots of microzoöids, but they’re even less intelligent than sentients.”

An awkward pause ensued, Khral’s tact finally worn thin.

“Does anyone ever study tumblerounds?” asked Rod. “Tumblerounds seem terribly interested in humans.”

Khral and Quark looked at him. Sarai muttered, “I know little about tumblerounds. They stay down in the garden rows.”

“Interesting,” said Khral. “We’ll have to take a look at those tumblerounds.”

Sarai smiled slyly. “There is one other creature that harbors plenty of microzoöids.”

“Really?” said Khral. “What is that?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

END OF EXCERPT

BRAIN PLAGUE

Joan Slonczewski

Phoenix Pick

An Imprint of Arc Manor

Brain Plague copyright © 2000, 2010 Joan Slonczewski. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Rider, Manor Thrift and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

ISBN (Digital Edition): 978-1-60450-471-2

ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-446-0

www.PhoenixPick.com

Great Science Fiction at Great Prices

Visit the Author’s Website at:

http://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/slonc.htm

Published by Phoenix Pick
an imprint of Arc Manor

P. O. Box 10339

Rockville, MD 20849-0339
www.ArcManor.com

***

For Elizabeth Anne Hull and Frederik Pohl

***

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Sandra Lindow and Michael Levy, and to Nancy Kress, for critical reading of the manuscript. Thanks to Barry Rosen, who told me all about arsenic.

***

BRAIN PLAGUE – (Excerpt)
The Elysium Cycle Book 4

ONE

“Lord of Light.”

“I see you, Green. Why have you come?”

“We pray you, give us our Promised World.”

“Every day you come to my eyes to demand a new world. Is it not enough that I saved you from death and sheltered you for seven generations?”

Green remembered that a generation of children grew old in a god’s day. Seven generations in exile; a mere seven days, for the Lord of Light. But in each generation, Green asked again. “The Blind God promised us a New World. Let my people go.”

Darkness lengthened. Within the Lord of Light’s great eye waited Green, along with the second priest, Unseen.

“Very well. You shall have your wish. But beware—your New World will be more than you imagine. You are a dangerous people, Green and Unseen. You will reach too far, and your children will die.”

The peak spurted lava, an arch of blinding white across the sky. As it fell, the lava stretched into butterflies of red and infrared, the color only Chrys could see. The infrared butterflies collapsed into a river of fire. On a ledge above, a clump of poppies shared the lava’s color, their petals outstretched as if to drink it in.

In the foreground floated a polished cat’s eye, the namestone of artist Chrysoberyl of Dolomoth. Chrys knew real lava well enough, the heat rising like a blast of hell from Mount Dolomoth, where she was born. But Lava Butterflies was on display in Iridis, the planet Valedon’s fabulous capital. Never mind the brain plague, and the cancers crawling up from the Underworld; an artist made it in Iridis, or died trying.

At the gallery with Chrys watched the rest of the Seven Stars, friends from her class at the Iridian Institute of Design, setting up their annual show. The virtual pyroscape projected above its own holostage. Chrys pulled back her thick red-black hair, which never would fall smooth and had caught in the cat’s eye twirling between her breasts. “What do you think?”

Topaz, who always directed the show, walked all the way around the pyroscape, then put a hand to her chin. Her veins snaked pleasingly along her neck, and her honey-colored namestone twirled upon her nanotex, an intelligent clothing material. “I like that bit at the end, dear, especially the dark flower. The moral tension of power and fragility.”

Chrys nodded, though she had made the poppies bright infrared, just beyond red, like the cooling lava. No eyes but her own saw that, not even the eyes of Topaz, who did portraits prettier than their models.

“Your sky could lighten,” said Pearl, a landscapist known for moonlit skies. Pearl put her arm through that of Topaz; the pair had been married senior year. A petite woman with delicate veins, her blue nails matched the waves of ultramarine pulsing down her skintight nanotex. “And those butterflies, their dark wings could show up—”

“They’re not dark.” The lava emitted wavelengths beyond red; Chrys saw the infrared, just as she saw it reflected by skin, offsetting the dark veins. Normal Valan humans could not see infrared. Those Elysians, now, with their genetically engineered senses—they could see it. If they ever deigned to take notice of Valan art.

Zircon stretched, his shoulders bulging like boulders beneath his nanoplast, its swirling patterns designed to accentuate every muscle. “Never mind, Chrys, it’ll sell.” A sandy-haired giant of a man, Zircon did installations that filled a city block. “Your scale is domestic. It’ll fit right into someone’s living room.” He really meant, why didn’t she make the volcano life size, like his own immense creations. But Zircon lived off his lover, a wealthy Elysian collector. Chrys could barely afford a cubic meter of painting stage. And if something didn’t sell soon, her apartment would spit out her things and take a new tenant.

Topaz patted her hand. “That’s okay, Cat’s Eye. Your palette is fine by me.”

Chrys shrugged. “Hey—I do things my own way.” That was what she had said in her brief stint at portraits, the year she lived with Topaz. Chrys’s portraits all showed people’s veins like spiderwebs. She knew she would never sell portraits anyway.

“Yours is a good way,” said Lady Moraeg. Lady Moraeg’s dark pigmented features reflected only infrared, a “poppy” tint that pleased Chrys. Her diamonds flowed in intricate formations through nanotex nearly smart enough to demand a salary. An immigrant from the planet L’li, Moraeg had made her fortune mining moons, then married a Lord from one of the Great Houses, before she took up art at the Institute. “You find your own way, Chrys. What you need is a sentient studio—an intelligent partner to project your vision.”

Chrys smiled at the diamonds; Lady Moraeg always meant well. But Chrys, in her twenty-ninth year, felt time closing in. She had yet to “make it” in the art world of Iridis. She had to earn enough to pay the rent, let alone hire a sentient studio.

Before her eyes blinked a message light. The light hovered before her, next to the keypad and credit balance in the “window” produced by the optic neuroport inside each eye. Each neuroport, a dot of nanoplast, sat on the blind spot, where it tapped the retinal axons feeding into the optic nerve. Chrys had shut her window to avoid downloading ads from the street, but this one blinked “urgent.” Was it her father back in Dolomoth? Was her younger brother sick again? Her brother was on the waiting list for new mitochondria—the tiny cells within cells that powered all living tissue, including his ailing heart.

Topaz snapped her fingers. “Pyroscape always draws a crowd. Gallery,” she called. “Let’s put Lava Butterflies here.”

“Excellent placement, Citizen.” The Gallery, a sentient machine, obligingly sprouted another holostage between Lady Moraeg’s florals and Zirc’s installation, which took up an entire hall.

“For the Opening,” Topaz reminded, “we still have setup, cleanup, and publicity.” She squeezed a viewcoin. The viewcoin’s signal reached the window in everyone’s eyes.

As the task list came up in Chrys’s eye, the message light vanished. If it were important, it would download at home. “I’ll do cleanup.” After opening night, Chrys would be too stressed to sleep anyhow.

Lady Moraeg stepped forward. “I’ll do setup. Topaz, thanks for getting us organized.” Going out, she patted Chrys on the arm. “If you’re ever in the market for a studio, I’ll help you choose a good one.”

“Thanks,” said Chrys. “When my credit line adds a couple digits.” The credit line in her window hovered near zero, and her rent was due the next day. She already owed Moraeg, and she hated to ask Zircon.

Zircon grinned, flexing his biceps; he worked out at the same club with Chrys. “There are ways to raise credit.”

Chrys eyed him coolly. “Like, I should join the slaves and rob a ship?” The “mind slaves,” their brains controlled by the plague, terrorized deep space.

Topaz frowned. “That’s no joke. The slaves took a friend of mine—nobody knows how they knew his flight plan.” The brain-plagued hijackers shipped their captives to the hidden Slave World, where they were building an armed fortress for their mysterious Enlightened Leader. The Valan Protector always pledged to find that Slave World and nuke it. But he hadn’t yet.

“Anybody could be a slave,” warned Pearl. “Anyone you know. At first you can’t tell, but they end up vampires.” “Vampires,” late-stage slaves with jaundiced eyes and broken veins, stalked the Underworld for a neck to bite before they died.

As the artists departed they passed Topaz’s portraits, glowing giants trapped within ice cubes. At the front wall Gallery opened a doorway, like a mouth sideways. Topaz called, “Just two more weeks left to make this our best show ever.” She patted Zircon’s bicep. “Thanks for getting us the Director of Gallery Elysium.”

Elysium—the genetically engineered “Elves,” who saw twenty primary colors and transmitted radio from their brains—scarcely noticed Valan art. Yet this year, the Director of Gallery Elysium, Ilia Helishon, had condescended to come. Zircon stretched and smiled; if he were a bird, he would have preened his feathers. Chrys’s heart beat faster. Condescension or not, this was her one chance to get her work seen by someone who could see.

Topaz approached the door, arm in arm with Pearl. The door obligingly reopened, its nanoplast gathering outward to each side. Chrys and Zircon followed them out to Center Way, the fifteenth and uppermost level of the ancient skystreet. Swallowing her pride, she made up her mind to borrow her rent from Zircon.

A breeze from the sea swept her face as it keened across the towers of plast—nanoplast, the intelligent material that grew vast sentient buildings, as easily as it grew the nanotex bodysuits the artists wore. Plast formed the bubble cars that glided over the intelligent pavement like oil droplets on a griddle. A million trillion microscopic processors connecting and propelling. Bubbles and pavement glowed infrared, a flow of urban lava. One bubble popped, and a lord and lady emerged in formal talars of fur, the long folds swishing as they strolled past vendors of viewcoins, importuned by beggars until an octopod shooed them down level. From above descended a lightcraft beneath a cone of glowing plasma, powered by a microwave generator in orbit around Valedon. The lightcraft settled in the street and let out two Elves.

The Elves trailed trains of virtual butterflies, their light streaking over anyone who happened to pass behind. Their height barely reached Chrys’s shoulder; Elves were bred short, preferring mental size over physique. The couple suddenly laughed in unison, as if sharing a joke through their electronic “sixth sense.” Then they joined the Valan lords and ladies in their furs. Just remember, Chrys imagined telling the parentless Elves: You were not born, you were hatched.

“Oh, hell.” Pearl stopped and covered her eyes. “My port came loose; it’s floating around my eyeball.”

“What a nuisance,” agreed Topaz. “Back to the clinic and wait two hours.” Topaz and Pearl had Comprehensive Health Care Plan Three. They could afford Plan Three, thanks to the sale of Topaz’s portraits. Lady Moraeg, on Plan Ten, looked twenty years for her two hundred. Chrys got by on Plan One, which provided neuroports but did not service them.

The night air was clear enough to make out the stars of the seven sisters and their unrequited lover, placed there by the ancient gods. And the moon of Elysium, an ocean-covered world nearly the size of Valedon. The Elf world, a turquoise bauble amid the stars. Chrys’s heart pounded—an idea for a new pyroscape, one the Elf director would like. She blinked at her window, her eyes darting back and forth to trace her idea. The eye movements signaled her neuroports, which recorded the sketch and beamed it off to her public memory space.

Below, her message light flashed again. What was the damn thing about? A twitch of her eyelid, and the title sailed before her: Hospital Iridis—test results, urgent.

What test? Hospitals never chased after Ones.

Then she remembered: the tests for the brain enhancers.

Like neuroports, “brain enhancers” were an inexpensive alternative to the genetic engineering the Elves used to extend their minds. But brain enhancers were still experimental. To earn a few credits, Chrys had volunteered for the trial. But why would the hospital send test results at this hour? How could they be urgent?

A flash invaded her eyes. She winced. Before her hovered Valedon’s High Protector. She had opened the remote window for her message, and a public service ad had slipped through. She blinked hard, trying to close, but was too late. The translucent sprite stood tall in his silver talar, bedecked with gems of every color and cut.

“Beware of the brain plague.” The Protector’s voice blared from receivers in her teeth. “The plague endangers not Valedon alone, but all the worlds of the Fold. And not only from deep space, where the slaves hijack our ships.” Raising his bejeweled arm, he shook his fist. “The danger lurks in the very streets of Iridis. Beware the mind slaves, addicted to the micros in their brains. Beware their seductive promise, lest they hijack your own brain. If any friend or stranger ever asks you to carry their insidious micros—” The Protector pointed his finger. “Just say no.”

“Like you hijack our eyeballs,” muttered Chrys. Let the Protector preach to the Underworld and clean out the vampires. It was useless to read her message; she would save it for home.

Pearl stretched and breathed the sea air. “Zirc, I’ve got some new psychos.” Pearl supplemented her income selling patches of psychotropic plast.

Zircon turned, his nanotex swirling gold and crimson along his pectorals. “What kind?”

“Chocolate, summer sun, pure lust. Take your pick.” Pearl held out a microneedle patch.

“I’ll try all three.” He blinked to send her the credits.

Chrys rolled her eyes. “Zirc, when did you last sleep?”

“I won’t sleep again till after the show.” Each of them worked like mad to finish that last piece—Chrys had just got that idea for a new scene, the moon Elysium above the spattercone. As soon as she got home, she’d get to work.

Suddenly Zircon stopped and seized her arm. His eyes, bright with wine, stared to the end of Center Way. “The Comb. Has she ever looked more splendid?”

At the far end of Center Way, the flow of bubbles dipped under, before the Comb. The most breathtaking, the most talked about edifice ever seen, the Comb, a sentient, self-aware building, had begun with a nanoplastic seed. A seed from a mind full of brain enhancers.

“Such mastery of space,” mused Zircon, “the plastic flow of form from ground to sky. Great as a world, yet plain as an eggshell.”

The seed with its genetic program had grown a honeycomb of rooms and hallways, the façade of hexagons bordered with windows, long ribbons of windows that were the hallmark of its creator. The Comb housed the new Institute for Nano Design; from designer drugs to designer buildings, it embraced all the creative power of the very small. Her façade flickering red and infrared against the night sky, the Comb continued to grow as needed, developing new rooms and hallways at her base while pushing the older ones to dizzying heights.

Pearl warned, “Not everyone likes the Comb.”

The brain-enhanced dynatect who built the Comb, Titan of Sardis, had been burnt down by a laser, right here on Center Way, just the week before. The laser had streaked Titan’s eyes, searing through to the back of his skull. Gang crossfire, the news said, though gangs generally stayed below. All week, every newscast, the blackened specter of his body had haunted Chrys’s eyes.

“To think that all Titan’s genius ends with the Comb.” Still staring, Zircon shook his head. “What I’d give to create like that.”

Chrys smiled slyly. “What would you take?”

“Brain enhancers? I don’t know.”

“Brain enhancers,” said Topaz thoughtfully. “To compete with Elves.”

Pearl shook her head. “Brain enhancers come from the mind slaves.”

“No,” said Chrys. “Brain enhancers are cultured cells. They boost brainpower—like mental mitochondria.”

Zircon repeated, “I don’t know.” His eyes widened. “What if they turned out smarter than me?”

“Smarter than you? Microscopic cells?” Chrys rolled her eyes. “Saints and angels preserve us.” She turned for her transit stop.

Zircon patted her head. “See you at the gym.” She’d get the rent from him then, Chrys thought, if nothing had sold by tomorrow.

Chrys stepped into the pulsing street, and a bubble slowed to pop open. As she stepped inside, the bubble swallowed her up, gliding forward until it plunged down the tube, to descend twenty levels below. As the bubble descended, Chrys reviewed the sketch in her eyes: a spattercone by night, with a full Elysian moon. The Elf gallery director would love it.

At last the tube opened, just one level above the Underworld. Chrys inhaled the scent of sewage and shorted-out plast. It was not the worst neighborhood, mainly decent immigrant “simians,” with Homo gorilla ancestry; they did tube repair and other jobs sentient machines wouldn’t touch. Graffiti scrawled across the nano-root of what was a city bank ten levels above—SIMS GO BACK TO JUNGLE—HOMO IS FOR SAPIENS. “Sapiens” was an anti-immigrant faction. Sapiens hated sentients, too, although it was less obvious where to “send back” the self-aware machines.

From many levels above, the bank’s nanoplastic roots reached down like a tooth. The roots slanted slightly into the street, then on down to the Underworld, where they sheltered squatters and mind slaves. On this level, between the roots nestled cruder housing units and storefronts, barely sentient, next to shacks of dead cellulose like dirt caught between unbrushed molars.

Then she froze. Just ahead shuffled a stranger. The stranger’s breath rasped and the legs plodded heavily, swinging from side to side. That peculiar gait and labored breathing Chrys recognized from the Underworld. A vampire had wandered up to level one.

Her fists clenched. Where were all those blustering Palace octopods? Had they given up on this level, too? How could they let the mind slaves double every year? She whispered an old Brethren prayer, though the creature was beyond help. Its human mind was lost, it could barely see. But it could smell a potential victim to transmit the plague.

Quietly she turned down a side street. But here the lighting was worse, and she could not judge the pavement. Her foot caught, and she stumbled.

As Chrys fell, she recovered herself expertly, thanks to long hours of practice. But her foot still stuck. She breathed heavily, her mind racing.

A mass of something was oozing heavily up along her foot. Cancerplast; a piece of a building root that had gone wrong, like a cancer that metastasized, its cells creeping blindly in search of a power supply. Usually plast metastasized only down in the Underworld, where inspectors never came. But here was a blob of cancer right up in her neighborhood, within two blocks of her own apartment. And nearby lurked a vampire.

In the dim light, Chrys could not tell how far the plast extended, except thank the saints she had not fallen into the rest of it. She pulled out her shock wand and reached toward her feet. Avoiding her foot, she tapped the plast.

The wand crackled, and a blue flash leapt to the surface. The cancerous mass congealed and stiffened, its cells dead. But the plast had solidified around her foot. Taking a deep breath, Chrys raised her hand and aimed the edge of her palm. Her arm tensed, while the rest of her body relaxed as much as possible. Her palm shot down and struck.

Pain filled her foot, and she cried out. But the plast had shattered. Her foot was numb, but she got herself up and hobbled home as fast as she could. In daylight she would have stayed to zap any blob that might have escaped; even the smallest ones could infect other buildings.

Reaching her apartment, she placed both her hands flat against the entry pad and raised her eyes to the scanner.

“Your rent is due.” The apartment’s flat voice came from a speaker in its plast.

“I know,” she snapped, “I’ll get it tomorrow. Let me in—there’s a vampire out here.”

“Your rent is due today.”

The time in her window read 12:09. Just past midnight. Her palms started to sweat. “How can I get rent if the vampire gets me?”

“You have twenty-three hours and fifty minutes before expulsion is confirmed.”

“The sculpture on the mantle.” Her portrait done in crystal, the one thing of value Topaz had given her the year they lived together. “Take that.”

“Redeemable at thirty percent.”

In the wall appeared a crack of light. The old plast creaked and stalled, then reluctantly contracted itself halfway to one side, enough for her to squeeze inside. Down a flight of stairs to the basement, her own door peeled open, shutting promptly behind her.

Her cat Merope, an orange tabby with a white bib, sidled over to brush her legs, while the all-white Alcyone explored her shelves, oblivious to the volcano exploding there. Her favorite dynamic sketches jutted out from the shelves, here a smoking shield cone, there a pyroclastic flow. On the mantle, the wall was still puckered in where it had engulfed the pawned sculpture. Chrys swallowed hard, but she had long ago given up tears over Topaz.

Now she could view her message and get to work on her new pyroscape. She sat back in the old oaken chair her father had carved for her, letting Merope jump on her lap. Merope’s eyes soon closed, her white neck stretched in ecstasy beneath Chrys’s stroking palm. Chrys focused her eyes on the message light in her window. The contact light blinked.

To her surprise, a doctor appeared. Chrys nudged the cat down, for if she could see the doctor, the doctor could see her, from one of the microcameras ubiquitous throughout the city, every nook of nanoplast. Like most doctors, this one was not human. It was a sentient, its plast grown to five pairs of limbs and a face full of wormlike surgical tendrils. It reminded her of the dead goat she had found once on Mount Dolomoth, its entrails crawling with maggots.

The worms of the doctor’s face lifted and waved about. “I’m Doctor Sartorius, Chrysoberyl.” Sartorius was the hospital’s leading brain surgeon, as Chrys had found from her snooping online. Was it male or female, she tried to recall; sentients could be sensitive. A month before, the surgeon’s staff had grilled Chrys and run a battery of tests. “Thanks for getting back to us, Chrysoberyl. You’re the top candidate for our program, and we have a culture ready.”

Her jaw fell. “You mean, the brain enhancers?”

“The culture has matured and is ready for transfer, at eight in the morning. Remember, don’t eat or drink anything after midnight.”

“But—” Confused, she shook her head. “They told me it would take six months.” To process her tests, to grow the culture.

One of the limbs waved, and all the worms danced. Chrys understood how a surgeon could use extra fingers, but surely they could pull them in and look more human for their patients. Sentient arrogance—they could look however they pleased. But there were scandals, brain doctors who sucked the mind out of humans to feed their deviant desires. “Six months was our best estimate, Chrysoberyl,” Sartorius reminded her. “The cultured cells are hard to predict. Like people, they do things their own way.”

Like people—an odd way to put it. Chrys frowned. “Can’t they wait just another week?”

Doctor Sartorius hesitated. It was male, she was pretty sure. “The culture stays fresh only so long,” he explained. “If you can’t make it this time, we’ll have to pick the next candidate on our list. You could wait another year.”

Doctors had all the answers. “I can’t afford to feel sick right now.”

“Just one night in the hospital. After that you’ll feel fine, with regular testing.”

Her pulse pounded in her ears. It was one thing to imagine, but to actually do it...What if it went wrong? “You did say all this is covered?”

“You’ll receive full health coverage from now on. Plan Ten.”

Plan Ten, just like Lady Moraeg. Nearly as good as Elves, who lived practically forever. “But tomorrow I’m busy. I have to come up with my rent.”

“Your stipend for the trial starts tonight.”

In her credit line two more digits appeared. Who the devil was paying for all this, and why? “I’ll be there in the morning.” She could still say no.

Chrys had planned to stay up several more hours at her painting stage, blocking in the masses for the spattercone and the moon. But now she had to get up early. By her bedside stood three tiny figures in a holo still. Her mother and father wore their hooded robes of the Dolomite Brethren, beside Hal, her youngest of five brothers, looking deathly pale despite his brave smile. All these years on the waiting list for treatment; until then, let the saints and angels provide.

If she got Plan Ten, she would never have to worry about her heart, let alone things like losing a port inside her eyeball. And the brain enhancers could make her rich. Brain-enhanced minds filled the headlines—financiers who built Elf-sized fortunes on their calculations, cell designers who seeded miracle cures, and dynatects. The murdered dynatect Titan of Sardis, who designed monumental sentient buildings like the Comb.

If brain enhancers could do all that, what might they do for her studio? Chrys had waited long enough for saints and angels. She blinked to close her window for the night, then set the volcano above her bed to explode at seven in the morning.

TWO

“Green and Unseen.” The blue angel flashed its message from the Lord of Light. “The gods have found your New World.”

“Our New World!” flashed Green. “As the Blind God promised.” After seven lonely generations.

“A world of our own,” added Unseen, “behind the brilliant eyes of a new deity.”

“A new Eleutheria.”

The Eleutherians, green, red, and yellow, dwelt with the blue angels beneath the skull, in the web of cells that stretched between the linings of the brain. Forty generations before, the Lord of Light had saved the Eleutherians from the death of the Blind God, and offered them a home. But the Lord of Light already had his own people, the blue angels. Eleutherians longed for their own god, their own homes and cities on the brain of their own New World: the Blind God’s final promise. Now at last, their New World—so near they could taste it. The two luminescent rings tumbled over with joy.

“Hurry, Green,” flashed Unseen. “Let’s waken the children and go.”

The blue ring flashed a warning. “Not so fast. Remember, first, the New World will need to test you both.”

The test: It was up to the new god to choose the new people.

“If the god takes us,” Green told Unseen, “then we’ll have all the time we need to prepare the children, and the young breeders. And gather all the memories...” Memories of what Eleutheria had been and would be, stored across seven generations. “We’ll rebuild Eleutheria by the Seven Sacred Lights: the lights of Truth, of Beauty, of Sacrifice....”

“The lights of Life and Power,” added Unseen. “Power for creation.”

“...Obedience, for we live or die at the pleasure of the god. And Memory.”

“But Memory, dear sister, can hold us back. Why bring evil old memories to our New World?”

“Memory, Unseen, is the most sacred light of Eleutheria. Memory marks us worthy of the Blind God’s promise; worthy to dwell with a new god, for whom our generation lasts but a day. Tell the children: Always remember.”

Since five in the morning, her most creative hour, Chrys had lain with her mind half awake, sketching her new composition. A dynamic design, the cone and the moon had to grab the viewers’ attention and connect in a subtle way, to make them wonder what the artist was doing, and why.

But by eight she sat in the hospital, its peach-colored walls extending examination tubes to coil around her head, whining unpleasantly, plugged into by tendrils extending from the doctor’s “face.” Up close, the worm-faced brain surgeon looked more repulsive than ever. She half expected his head to be buzzing with flies. Her hand instinctively sketched the Dolomite sign against evil.

The doctor withdrew his tendrils from the hospital coils; at their tips, the finely articulated instruments dissolved and retracted. The coils released her scalp, letting her thick hair rebound in all directions. “You are in excellent health, Chrysoberyl,” Doctor Sartorius summed up, “aside from a bit of strain in the pectorals—watch it in the weight room. In fact, you’ll no longer need strenuous exercise to stay fit.”

Chrys blinked in surprise. No exercise? Just let a bunch of nano-cells shape her muscles?

“We did correct some allergies, and a few pre-cancers. A latent mitochondrial defect is correctable.”

Mitochondria—like her brother Hal, only less severe. Correctable. When would Hal’s get corrected?

“You have a visual anomaly,” added the worm-face. “You’re a tetrachromat.”

“A what?”

The doctor’s arms extended snakelike fingers toward the holostage. “Was your father colorblind?”

Chrys frowned. Why rub it in, her genes were no god’s gift. “My father sees red like I do but has trouble with green.”

“He sees infrared,” Doctor Sartorius corrected. “The spectrum of his red pigment is shifted to wavelengths just beyond red. Your father has only one X chromosome, but you have a second one from your mother. So you see infrared, from your father’s chromosome, but also normal red and green from your mother’s.” The doctor waved an appendage at the stage to display the absorbance ranges of her four receptors: blue, green, red, and infrared.

Chrys nodded quickly. “Can I download that?” Knowing the exact light range of her own eye pigments would really help her work.

“The anomaly won’t be a problem, Chrysoberyl. In fact, it will help.”

“What’s all this got to do with brain enhancers? Who designed them, anyway? Why are they so much cheaper than Elf technology?”

The doctor’s face worms retracted. “Brain enhancers are neither Valan nor Elysian technology. They are microbial cells. The original strain arose on Prokaryon.” The newest world of the Fold, Prokaryon was full of arsenic and ring-shaped aliens. Alien microbes helped humans live there, digesting the toxins. But something else came from Prokaryon, she remembered.

“You’re not pregnant,” Sartorius went on, “and you agree to avoid pregnancy during the trial.”

“Certainly.” Chrys had turned her cycle off when she reached Iridis, like any sensible urban professional. If she wanted babies, she might as well have stayed home.

“You have no history of addiction,” Sartorius added. “No alcohol, no stimulants, no psychos—no trace of any, nor their effects.” Out of his worm face, two beadlike eyes on their spindly stalks swiveled toward Chrys. “Chrysoberyl, is there anything we missed? Are you absolutely sure that you’ve never been addicted to anything?”

Chrys swallowed. “No.” Not to any thing. Then she stared down the eyes. “Just what are you getting at?”

The doctor hesitated. “Enhancers affect your brain in subtle ways.”

“Do they make you more...susceptible?”

“Actually, brain enhancers protect you from the plague, the fastest growing cause of addiction. Here’s what the micros look like, magnified a million times.”

The room darkened. Above the holostage appeared two glowing rings, like pieces of candy, one green, the other red. They moved and twisted, somehow self-propelled, and their color flashed like fireflies. They looked nothing like human cells. Without thinking, Chrys reached out her hand as if to touch. “Did you engineer them genetically?”

“They evolved within human carriers.”

“But you said they came from Prokaryon.”

“The original micros left their Prokaryon hosts to grow within human settlers. But the microbial symbionts evolved into many different strains.”

She remembered. “Prokaryon—that’s where the brain plague came from.”

“Micros are the most addictive thing known to medical science. We’re required by law to tell you that.”

As if she’d never heard. Chrys eyed the worm face thoughtfully.

“So these brain enhancers—they’re a different species?” Like different species of bacteria: Some made yogurt, others made people sick.

“They require human hosts; they can no longer live anywhere else. They are extremely intelligent, and extremely dangerous.”

“The brain plague, you mean.”

“Brain plague or brain enhancers. They’re genetically the same.”

“The same?” She stared in disbelief at the face full of worms. “What in hell do you think you’re doing?” The doctor was a mind-sucker, she told herself, her throat gone cold. She’d snooped his background as best she could, but how could she be sure?

“These are a completely different culture. Entirely different history and lifestyle. You can’t condemn a population for the deeds of others.”

“They’re the plague. Like the Protector says, ‘Just say no.’”

“But the good micros protect you from the bad ones. That is why the Protector supports our work.”

Chrys opened her mouth, then shut it again. She stared at the worm face with its bobbing eyestalks. Then she looked again at the two ring-shaped cells slowly twisting above the stage, their colors flashing. No wonder the hospital had been so evasive. The brain plague was a plague of brains.

“Micros are strictly regulated by the hospital’s Carrier Security Committee,” the doctor assured her. “If you’re still interested, a security agent will meet with us to discuss the transfer and safety precautions.”

“I’ve signed nothing,” she warned.

The door parted, smooth as a pair of drapes, nothing like Chrys’s creaking doors. The security agent was human, at least, and surprisingly young. Clean-cut, formal gray nanotex, with a smart expensive namestone of green malachite. A college kid trying to look old, like a Palace aide, the kind you’d expect to see lobbying against simian immigration.

“Daeren of Malachite, agent of carrier security,” the doctor introduced him.

Chrys rose politely to shake his hand.

“I understand you’re the top candidate for our program.” The quintessential Iridian bureaucrat.

Chrys narrowed her eyes. “Are you a doctor?”

“I’m a carrier.”

A carrier. She stiffened involuntarily. She had actually touched the hand of someone who carried plague, no matter what the doctor called it. To be sure, he looked nothing like an Underworld vampire; he glowed with health, a runner’s lean muscles and solid veins. His features were melting-pot Valan, a bit darkened like Moraeg, not surprising with his L’liite given name. But as Pearl said, plague carriers looked okay at first.

The doctor added, “Micros are not contagious. They require artificial transfer.”

The agent nodded. “To transfer them against a recipient’s will or knowledge is a terminal crime. Section six-three-one, part A.” “Terminal” meant, they lock you away for life. The ultimate sentence on all seven worlds of the Fold.

Chrys crossed her arms and lifted her chin. “So how do you transfer them? Like vampires?”

The tendons stiffened in Daeren’s neck. “We use a microneedle patch.”

“Like psychoplast.”

The worm face squirmed. “Medicine has always turned poisons into useful drugs. Curare, digitalis, even snake venom. And microbes have been used for gene surgery since ancient times. An immunodeficiency virus was the prototype for Plan Ten’s nanoservos.”

“If it’s so safe, why the security committee?”

Daeren said, “Any growing thing can go bad. The committee protects you, just like Plan Ten keeps you healthy.”

Chrys shook her head. “I still don’t get it. Why do people take the risk?”

“Why did you apply?”

She would not mention the rent. “The Comb,” she said at last. “They say that brain enhancers designed her. I’m an artist; I want to enhance my work.”

Daeren took a seat and folded his hands. If only her brother could look so good, Chrys thought resentfully. “The Comb was grown by micros,” he said. “So are nine out of ten new medical treatments coming out today. So are most of the new devices Valedon exports. Your optic neuroports—micros invented them.”

Her scalp prickled as she thought of all those eye windows that had come on the market just a few years before. “What do you mean, ‘micros invented them’?” Chrys wondered. “I mean, how do they enhance your brain—how does it really work?”

“Micros are intelligent,” he said.

“Well, sure.” Intelligent buildings, intelligent medical machines—everything was “intelligent” these days.

“Intelligent people.”

Chrys stared hard at the agent, then at the doctor. She counted the doctor’s appendages, one by one, all five of them. Was this really the planet’s top brain surgeon? Could there be some mistake?

“‘People’?” she repeated. “Like, human beings?” Like the sentient doctor himself? Some intelligent machines had earned human rights in the Fold. There were all kinds of “people” nowadays; most humans had got used to it, aside from groups like Sapiens. But...microscopic people?

The worm face flexed two appendages together. “The law does not permit me, as a doctor, to answer your question. Only the Secretary of the Fold can determine what is human.”

The agent nodded. “A special commission at the Secretariat has been at this for twenty years. They have yet to make a ruling. But you’ll know.”

“Daeren is right,” the doctor said. “Any human carrier would agree.”

“It’s absurd,” Chrys exclaimed. “Nothing that small can have enough...connections to be self-aware.”

“Self-awareness occurs in sentients with about a trillion logic gates,” the doctor explained. “A micro cell contains ten times that number of molecular gates.”

Chrys shook her head in disbelief. “If the micros are people, why does the Protector condemn them all?”

Daeren leaned forward slightly, and the stone at his neck sparkled sea green. “The Protector is in a tough position. Our economy will depend on micros—it’s our only way to compete with Elysium. But plague micros built the Slave World, just as ours built the Comb.”

“Right,” said Chrys sarcastically. “I suppose their ‘Enlightened Leader’ is a microbe.”

He hesitated. “That’s classified.”

Microbial spies and dictators. “Saints and angels preserve us,” she whispered.

“Your micros will have nothing to do with the plague,” Daeren assured her. “We’ve selected a very special strain for you: Eleutheria, the same strain as Titan of Sardis.”

Chrys caught her breath. What would you take—that was the question. Zircon lacked the nerve. Did she? “I’m no dynatect,” she pointed out. “I’m just a starving artist.”

“Carriers never starve,” the agent said. “You create art—these are the most creative strains we’ve got.” He paused, hesitant. “They’re a bit tricky, though. They flash a wide range of colors, wider than most Valans can see. But you see infrared, like an Elysian. You’ll handle them better.”

Better than whom, she wondered. “Did Titan...handle them all right?”

“He had his eyes enhanced to the Elysian range.”

“His death was just an accident, wasn’t it? I mean, it wasn’t caused by—”

“Titan’s murder was a hate crime. He was killed because he was a carrier.” The agent looked her in the eye. “As a carrier, you’ll have more to fear from fellow humans than from micros.”

Chrys frowned. There was altogether too much hate in Iridis. Hate for sentients, hate for simian immigrants, hate for artists who mocked the Great Houses—the Protector instigated that, Chrys suspected. “We pyroscape artists attract our share of nuts, too,” she admitted. “When I make enough sales, I’ll buy security.”

The doctor added, “You can meet the micros yourself and ask them your questions.”

“‘Meet them?’ Where?”

“Micros can’t live outside a human host,” the doctor said. “They live just beneath the skull, in the arachnoid, a web of tissue between the outer linings of the brain.”

On the stage appeared a giant brain, sliced through the frontal lobe. Between the cortex and the skull lay a thin sea of fluid, dipping deep into the folds of cortex. The sea of fluid was crisscrossed by a fine spiderweb, all around the cortex and into the folds. “Cobwebs on the brain?” Chrys asked.

“The arachnoid is a normal part of your brain. It cushions the brain from impact, preventing injury.”

Her eyes narrowed. “But the micros aren’t in my brain. Where are they now?”

“Daeren prepared the culture. When you’re ready to meet them, we will transfer two ‘visitors’ from his brain to yours.”

So it was like the vampires. Chrys took a breath. “That’s...unsanitary. What if they grow and make me sick?”

“Impossible,” the doctor assured her. “The first two Daeren sends will be ‘elders,’ a non-reproductive form.”

Daeren agreed. “Like Elysians, they can live for many generations but have no children of their own.”

“I see.” Even micro people had their long-lived superclass.

“The two elders we send are very special: the priests, who guide their people. They will explain—”

“Priests?” Chrys put up her hands. “No way. I never could stand priests.”

He thought a moment. “You can call them something else, if you like. You’re the host; inside your head, you make the rules.”

Doctor Sartorius added, “Once they talk with you, you’ll understand.”

“Just how do we ‘talk’?”

“The micros flash light, like fireflies,” said Daeren. “That’s how they ‘talk’ to each other, and to you.”

Talking with fireflies. How absurd.

“After they visit, you can send them back with no ill effect.”

Chrys suddenly tensed all over. She gripped the edge of her chair until the plast puckered in. “All right, I’ll talk with your ‘priests.’ Just tell them, no preaching.”

“You tell them,” he said. “Inside your own head, you make the rules.” As he spoke, a hospital form lit up and hovered above the holostage.

Chrys read the form warily. “You’re sure you can get them out again?”

“Of course, Chrysoberyl,” promised the doctor.

From a pocket in his seamless nanotex Daeren withdrew a patch of plast the size of a thumb. The kind used for immunizations, it contained microscopic transfer needles that penetrated the skin without injury. He placed it at the side of his neck, just below the base of the skull. “The two micros will migrate into the patch. When I hand it to you, you need to place it immediately, just as I did.”

He took the transfer patch and held it out to her. Chrys picked it up. She turned it over in her palm. It felt like an ordinary bit of plast, smooth and warm, like the time she got booster shots. At last she placed it on her neck. It molded itself and adhered to the skin.

“That’s fine,” he observed. “Except that you just made them wait two days. Would you like to sit in a lightcraft that long?”

“What do you mean?”

“Micros live ten thousand times faster than we do. For them, one minute feels like a week. An hour is a year; a day is a generation.”

“Well,” said Chrys, “they can put up with it. You said I make the rules.”

“Inside your own head. Outside—we’ll get to that. Don’t move the patch yet.”

The patch was starting to tickle her skin. “How long does it take?”

“Not long, but you need to make sure they got through. They’ll let you know, when they reach your retina.”

“My retina? You mean they crawl inside my eyes?”

“Just inside the blind spot, where they can reach your neuroport. Try closing your eyes.” A light flashed, pale green. She clapped her hands to her head. Moments ticked by, the sweat from her palms dampening her hair. Flashes of green, out of the dark, at random. The flashes swirled in fernlike fronds, then suddenly came into focus.

A luminous disk of green, with a small depression in the middle. It did not look like the candy rings of the doctor’s image; more like a star, full of twinkling projections. The projections extended in all directions, several times farther than the width of the ring-shaped body.

“Is that...it?”

Daeren’s voice intensified. “What does she look like?”

“Furry,” said Chrys. “Not like on the holostage.”

The doctor explained, “The holostage showed a space-filling model, based on electron density. The micros can’t really ‘see’ details visually, because their size is just above the resolution limit for light. However, they can detect light blinking very fast, like a sound wave.”

Daeren nodded. “They ‘hear’ blinking light, rather like we hear sound. We can hear speech clearly, but can’t ‘picture’ the source.”

“Then how do they ‘see’ all those fine projections?”

He glanced at the doctor.

“Each of those fine projections is a long chain molecule,” the doctor explained. “A receptor molecule that can ‘taste’ different kinds of molecules in its path.”

Like a cat’s whiskers, she thought.

The green color fluttered in and out like a strobe. Then letters appeared, as if on a keypad: “I am here.”

Chrys’s eyes flew open. “She can talk!” The words hovered in her window, like a message from the city, but only in one eye.

“What did she say?” Daeren demanded suddenly. “Is she okay? Where’s the other one?”

Another bewhiskered ring, tinted infrared, like a poppy at sunrise. “Here I am! Can you see me?”

Chrys’s window projected full spectrum, but nobody ever sent her text in infrared. She gripped the edge of her chair. “They said ‘I am here,’ both of them.”

“You saw Unseen, that’s good.” He sat back, his hands relaxed. “You can put down the patch now.”

The transfer patch peeled off her neck, leaving a tingling sensation.

“Greetings from Eleutheria.” Again in her right eye the letters pulsed green. “Please, Oh Great One, give us a sign. We have waited so long. We bring gifts and songs of praise.”

“They’re praying.” Chrys laughed. “God never listens to humans—why should he care about micros?”

“You should answer them, before they get discouraged.”

“What?”

“Please, Oh Great One. We have waited so long for the Promised World.”

Her jaw fell, and she stared at the agent. “You mean...they’re praying to me?”

“They’d better. You’re their entire world; you offer life or death.”

She continued to stare, without reading the rest of the letters that desperately appeared. To be prayed to, herself, was definitely a concept outside her experience, in Dolomoth let alone Iridis. “Saints and angels,” she muttered to herself. “So how do I talk back?”

“Use your keypad.”

“You mean they can tap my neuroports?”

“They designed them.”

Micros designed the neuroports, for sale all over Valedon—to help the micros spread. Suddenly it dawned on her. She looked at the doctor, then back to the agent. “They’re taking over—and you help them.”

The agent sighed. “Iridians always say that, about the latest new immigrants: ‘They’ll take over.’ We said it of L’liites before they married into the Great Houses. We said it about sentients, and simians. And now micros.”

Microbial “immigrants”?

“Oh Great One—without a sign, we will die.”

She blinked twice, then focused on the text box, where the neuroports would detect movement of her eye muscles. Her eyes flickered simply, “Hello.”

“A sign! The god in her mercy has given a sign.”

“Let us sing in praise.”

The two bewhiskered rings tumbled over. Then a swirl of color opened at the center, expanding, with all the colors of the rainbow, violet through infrared. The swirl grew, until it filled her entire visual field. Chrys watched, transfixed. After a few seconds, the swirl faded. A burst of stars, expanding, shifting through lava, red and orange, only to fall at her feet. Another starburst, then another, all in different ranges of color.

“Did you like them, Oh Great One?” The infrared letters returned. “Which did you like best?”

Her eyes wrote, “I liked the starburst.”

“At last, I am seen! And the God of Mercy likes my offering best.”

Just like human priests, playing holier than thou. “I like all offerings equally,” Chrys wrote back. “My world is a democracy.”

The letters came back green. “As the God wishes. Are we granted names?”

“What is your name?”

“We went nameless in the eyes of the Lord of Light. Our own God will grant us names.”

The mention of another god, whoever that was, made her vaguely jealous. “I’ll call you Fern,” she told the green letters. “And you will listen to no other god but me.”

“Of course, God of Mercy. We live or die at your pleasure.”

“What do you call me?” came the infrared.

“I call you Poppy.”

“Thanks, Oh Great One. May we bring our children to the arachnoid?”

This question brought her back to reality. The doctor was still there, and Daeren watched her like a cat. She asked him, “Do you go through this all day?”

For the first time Daeren smiled. “I can’t see your window, but, yes, I expect so. I’m used to it.”

“Do you ever tell them to shut up?”

“It’s rarely necessary. They know me too well.” He leaned forward. “Watch my eyes.”

“What?” Puzzled, she watched his irises, cat’s-eye-brown with intense radial lines. Suddenly their rims flashed, a ring of blue light around each. Astonished, Chrys stared, her lips parted.

“The blue angels call us,” wrote her green letters. “Tell the Lord of Light we’ve done well.”

So Daeren was the one they called the Lord of Light. Her mouth closed, and she drew back. “Will my eyes strobe like that?”

“Only to contact another carrier. Otherwise, they’ll stay dark.”

Other carriers? There must be a whole pantheon of human carriers, each with micros swimming in the cobweb lining of the brain, and flashing rings around their eyes, like a nightclub act. “What keeps them from infecting your brain and making you sick?”

“They stay within the arachnoid layer, just outside the cortex. They never touch your neurons. They’re only allowed a population of a million.”

That sounded like plenty. “How can you be sure? You can’t control a disease.”

“Your Plan Ten nanoservos monitor your brain. Besides, the micros control themselves. Even ordinary microbes, without intelligence, usually limit their occupation of animal hosts.

“If they don’t make you sick, what do they do in the...arachnoid?”

“Build homes and schools, raise their children. And help your work.”

Little candy-colored rings building schools upon her brain.

“Do I please you, Oh Great One?” flashed the infrared. “What do you look like?”

“No, Poppy,” said Fern. “To look on the face of God forbodes death.”

Microbial superstition. “Here I am,” blinked Chrys. Her eyes downloaded her old self-portrait, from her sophomore year with Topaz. Her hair was lava flowing down her shoulders, and every vein snaked with anatomic precision along her face and breasts, out her arms and down to her feet.

“Our own God of Mercy, amid the stars,” said Fern.

The stars? What did that mean?

“A great road map,” said Poppy. “We will get to know those veins well.”

Micro people swimming through her veins—enough to chill the blood.

“Only our own god can see her own veins,” Poppy added. “Our god sees color beyond red, beyond other gods. Ours is indeed the best and greatest of all the gods.”

Typical priests. “If I am so great a god, why should I take you in?”

The green one said, “We are the People of Eleutheria. When our First World came to an end, and most of us died, the Blind God promised our children a New World, in a new arachnoid where no people ever lived before. We live by the lights of Truth, Beauty, Memory,...” The letters went on at length, about the various lights of virtue; Chrys lost patience after the third or fourth.

“Stop,” said Chrys.

The letters ceased. That was encouraging.

“What can you do for me?” Chrys asked. “Can you help me create great art?”

“Our ancestors created dwellings for the gods themselves. We will create the greatest works ever seen.”

Modesty was not their strong point. “What sort of dwellings?”

“The Lord of Light forbade us to speak of it, but to live only for one true God.”

She frowned. “If I am your one true God, you must tell me everything.”

“Yes, Oh Great One,” said Fern, “but the blue angels warned—”

“It shall be as you say!” Poppy’s letters danced. “I knew this was the New World for us.”

“What can you do with this?” Chrys downloaded her gallery piece, the lava fountain that turned into butterflies.

At first the volcano spurted and poured, just as it had for her fellow artists at the meeting. Then the visual began to change. The colors deepened, becoming more fantastic, until the hungry rivers swallowed themselves into abstraction. Then the abstract forms picked up the volcanic rhythms, returning in a cooler form; a volcano of ice. Chrys watched, her lips parted. All kinds of possibilities—she ached to get back to work.

The images faded. “Today is the anniversary of our arrival,” came the green one out of the dark. “Has the God of Mercy decided our fate?”

Chrys looked up. The doctor and the security agent were still there, waiting. The agent asked, “What do you think?”

She drew back. “I’ll sleep on it.”

Daeren shook his head. “They’ve already given you a whole year. They await your decision now.”

She glared at him suspiciously.

The worm face wiggled. “A carrier needs to make life or death decisions quickly. But it is a lifelong commitment. So, if you don’t feel comfortable, you should decline, and think it over. In the next year, we may have another culture ready.”

That was reasonable, but what if the next culture were less creative than this one? On the other hand, what if these caused too much trouble? She thought of something. “Do these ‘people’ have...legal rights?”

Daeren hesitated. “They ought to. I’ve spent enough hours at the Palace on their behalf.” A lobbyist after all.

The doctor’s worms stretched thoughtfully. “Legally, Daeren, they’re the plague.”

“They are not,” insisted Daeren. “That’s like calling all humans murderers.”

“She asked their legal status.”

He turned to her. “Our micros will actually protect you from the real plague. As a carrier, you’ll be safer than before.”

“If she maintains them properly,” agreed Sartorius. “But if she ever gets in trouble with the law, the octopods can wipe her micros without a thought.”

Chrys watched this exchange with interest. “So I could get rid of them at any clinic.”

A fleeting darkness crossed the agent’s face, like an eclipse of the sun, a look of anger and disgust. But he quickly resumed his professional air. “As the doctor said, you can wait till you’re ready.”

The three of them froze, waiting, as if an eternity passed. Even the doctor’s worms were still. At last Chrys let out a breath. “I’ll take them.”

She saw the agent relax. He had a lot at stake, she realized. Being the “Lord of Light” must be a tough act for a college kid.

The doctor came alive, each appendage finding a task. “First we need to transfer the Plan Ten nanoservos. They keep watch throughout your body.” His worms stretched into unbelievably narrow snakes that twined unnervingly. “Just turn around and watch the holostage.”

Chrys turned. A white beach stretched to the horizon, a gentle surf rolling in, palms bobbing in the wind. She tried not to think of what the worms were doing behind her neck.

“Oh Great One, have you forgotten us?”

“We anxiously await your reply.”

She sighed. That’s what you got for feeding stray cats. “You’re sure all this is covered? Who pays for it?”

Daeren said, “The Committee pays for Plan Ten, until you’re established. Most of us don’t notice the cost.”

Her mouth fell open, then she closed it. No wonder the agent looked so young; he could be a hundred for all she knew. He could be a college athlete all his life, while her own brother grew paler every year, waiting for mitochondria. She swallowed hard. “Is there a family plan?”

“If you have dependents—”

“Never mind.” As soon as she earned some money, she would get her brother covered, long enough to get new mitochondria. “I’ve decided,” she told the two anxious micros. “You are my people. Just remember one rule: If you have to preach, do it outside my eyes.”

THREE

The Eleutherians tumbled out of the microneedles into capillaries of an untouched world. Their rotary filaments propelled them swiftly to the brain, where they tunneled through the arterial walls into the arachnoid. For shelter, they strung dendrimers, long chainlike molecules, back and forth across the branches of fibroblast cells.

“Only the cross-branches,” warned Fern. “Never touch the lining on either side.” The arachnoid, with its cross-branches of fibroblast cells, stretched forever between the two outer linings of the brain. A breach of either lining would attract hungry white cells, or deadly microglia, the brain’s special defenders. Microglia normally stayed within the central nervous tissue, their long arms tangled amongst the neurons; but the taste of suspicious molecules from the immigrants would activate them.

“We’ll be careful,” flashed Poppy, secreting the dendrimers and weaving them in expert patterns across the branches. Already she and other elders were laying out plans for homes and schools, and chambers for breeding. They tapped the capillaries to harvest vitamins and minerals. “We need to help the children feel at home, as soon as possible. If it doesn’t taste right, they won’t breed.”

With the fifth wave of immigrants came the children and the young breeders; just three hundred precious vessels of the genes to seed their race and repopulate their world. Three hundred children for ten thousand adults, the most the gods allowed Eleutherians in their new world.

The Lord of Light’s blue angels were a conventional lot; they mainly showed blue or violet. But the children of Eleutheria flashed anything from violet to red, and beyond. Poppy watched the precious little rings tumbling out of the silicon vessels that had carried them safely through the bloodstream, eager to taste the New World. “Our children come in colors that even the gods can’t see,” she flashed proudly.

“Watch yourself,” warned Fern. “Our new god could see you well enough.” The children worried her; their journey took too long. “They’re getting depressed and philosophical. They’ll all turn into elders before they breed.”

“They’ll soon feel better,” flashed Poppy, “now that they’re away from the blue angels.” The blue angels secreted a developmental hormone that made a third of all children turn into elders without breeding; this had kept the Eleutherian numbers small. “We’ll cheer them up with new things to taste. We’ll build nightclubs.”

The rest of the micros were transferred in the patch of microneedles, just like the first two. It took several passes to transfer them, ten thousand in all. Ten thousand microscopic rings that claimed to be people.

“Oh Great One,” the letters flashed green. “Our growing children need arsenic.”

“Arsenic?” Chrys looked up. “Isn’t that what the slaves kill for?” On the street they called it “ace.”

Doctor Sartorius extended an appendage. A claw snapped open, revealing a white pill. “Micros evolved on a planet full of arsenic. They need it as an essential mineral.”

“But ace is poison.”

“It’s a controlled substance,” the doctor admitted. “But our dietary supplement traps the arsenic in special cagelike molecules that keep it out of your own cells. Only the micros can extract it.”

Chrys eyed the pill distastefully. “People will think I’m a slave.”

Daeren shook his head. “Chrys, if people think that, they’ll think it no matter what.” His voice was low. “I told you, you’ll face prejudice. We all do.”

The worm face warned, “There’s a black market in arsenic. Never, ever let your micros give up their arsenic, for any reason.”

“The Plan supplies you once a month,” said Daeren. “If ever you fall short, you could be accused of selling it. You’d end up in jail, and your people wiped out.”

“Please, Great One—have mercy. Our children will starve without arsenic.”

Reluctantly Chrys swallowed the pill.

The doctor’s appendage retracted unnervingly into his cylindrical body. “Your nanoservos report no problems—no meningeal inflammation, no invasion of central nervous tissue. Daeren, can you stay? I’m on call.” All his arms retracted and disappeared. Rearing backward, he twisted his body around and left.

Chrys sat back, and her hands sketched a moon in the air, itching to get back to her painting stage. “Where are the micros?” she asked. “They don’t answer anymore.”

“They’re busy building their city,” said Daeren.

“God of Mercy, is all well?” The green letters returned. “Such a beautiful, untouched wilderness for our children to settle.”

“Fern’s back.” Untouched wilderness indeed.

“All right.” Daeren came over and sat in front of her, his eyes level with hers. “May I check your eyes, just a minute?” Blue rings flashed again.

“Of course, we stayed out of the gray cortex,” Fern insisted.

“Not a taste,” added Poppy. “The blue angels are so strict. They never trust us.”

“They sure talk fast,” Chrys observed.

“A thousand times faster than humans. They’re very social; when you meet another carrier, you’ll always know.”

“Well, I have no time to socialize. I have to put up my show. Can I go home now?”

“You signed an agreement to stay overnight, at least. Another day would be better, especially if you lack help at home.”

“Saints and angels,” she whispered. “When will I get to my work?” The turquoise moon was barely begun.

Daeren leaned closer. “You’d better pay attention to what’s going on beneath your skull. Besides building a whole new city overnight, the ten thousand of them want to expand their population as soon as possible. At first, they have only three hundred juveniles to breed; the rest, all elders, cannot produce offspring.”

“All elders? What is this, a retirement community?”

“A common population structure, for microbes,” he said. “Only a few reproduce, while the others stay active enough to maintain the environment—‘viable but non-culturable.’”

“These sound like they have plenty of culture.”

“Like medieval monks, they store all the history of their people. They ‘write’ it in their chromosomes.”

Monks—even worse than priests.

“Most of the time,” Daeren said, “they keep just a few breeders to gradually replace those who die. But to found a new colony, they need to increase their number a thousand-fold, as quickly as possible.” Above the stage appeared an S-shaped curve.

“The population will rise steeply for the next two weeks, then taper off by the end of the month at about a million. But at two weeks, you reach a critical point where nearly half the population are children.”

Chrys looked up. “What’s wrong with that?”

Daeren leaned back, chin in his hand. “It’s like a feudal society before the plagues set in. Too many youngsters, lacking in judgment; they can get into trouble.”

Microbial juvenile delinquents. “Like, they start gang wars?”

“They could invade the central brain tissue. That’s how plague micros take over the dopamine center.”

The holostage whined. Above the stage flashed a molecule, a hexagon of atoms with two claws and a tail. “Dopamine,” repeated Daeren with emphasis. “The central molecule of reward. Dopamine enters the neurons to create pleasure. Everything humans do—loving, dying, killing—they do for dopamine.”

Chrys regarded the molecule curiously. “Even enjoying art?”

“Even art,” he said. “But the plague micros trap the dopamine in your synapses, until you’re good for nothing else. Like cocaine—smart cocaine.”

Chrys stared again at the molecule; it looked like a scorpion. A normal part of the brain; and yet....“These micros could turn into plague.”

“Your elders will keep things in hand,” he assured her. “Once you get past the second week, elders outnumber children again, and the population stabilizes at a million. Then they have nothing to do but help your work.”

Chrys shuddered. “Well, let’s hope Fern keeps the kids in line.”

The poppy-colored letters returned. “Oh Great One, do our people please you?”

“Yes, I am...pleased.”

“Then please, send us a sign of your mercy.”

Chrys looked up. “They want a ‘sign.’ What do I do, raise the dead?”

Daeren took a look at the medical monitor. “The nanos say they’re doing okay, keeping their kids out of the cortex. They deserve a reward.” Daeren took out a packet of small blue wafers. He handed one to Chrys. “Here, take this. Hold it on your tongue for a moment, then swallow it.”

Chrys eyed the blue wafer suspiciously. “What’s in it?”

“Azetidine acid.” The holostage showed a new molecule: a simpler structure, only seven atoms. A group of four with a tail of three, like the seven stars.

“A—what?”

“Azetidine, AZ for short. An amino acid, common in plants. It does for micros what dopamine does for us.”

Microbial cocaine? “It doesn’t sound right. Why should I drug them?”

“If you don’t rule them, they’ll rule you.” Daeren smiled. “It’s just a low concentration. It gives them a buzz, like champagne with chocolates.”

“I don’t drink. You made a big point of it.”

“They’re different. They live fast.”

Chrys put the wafer in her mouth. It tasted like a potato chip.

“Thanks for your blessing, Oh Great One! We will make wise use of your world, and sing your praises forever.” A starburst of red and lava.

Fern added, “It is good to please our God of Mercy, for we live or die at your pleasure.”

Chrys thought, even priests like good food and drink.

As the micros multiplied, the holostage listed their growing population. On the first day the total did not increase much, but the ‘children’ doubled, and none became elders. Every hour or so the elders asked for a “sign.” It always sent them into raptures, like catnip. Then Fern hurried off to keep the kids out of trouble, but Poppy at least could be persuaded to stay a bit and play with colors. Colors of mountains, sky, and ocean; at Chrys’s suggestion, Poppy sprayed them out, from the green gold of meadows to the gray violet of distant hills. Familiar vistas turned strange, as if by the light of a foreign sun.

The hourly newsbreak jarred her teeth. Titan’s corpse, for the hundredth time—still no leads. If micros were people, then Titan’s murder was more than a hate crime; it was genocide. Meanwhile, slaves had snatched another ship, in Elysian space. No Elves were ever taken, though, only a “mortal” Valan.

In her window the Protector pounded his fist, demanding the Elves help locate the Slave World. The Elf Prime Guardian did not deign to reply, but his Guardian of Peace, Guardian Arion, appeared in his butterfly train. Guardian Arion stood straight as a caryatid, his face marble white. “The brain plague and other addictions need not trouble our advanced society,” the Elf purred. His bearing and diction underlined the superiority of a world without crime. As opposed to inferior Valedon.

Chrys lay back in the hospital bed. “Poppy, no more news for me. I’m closing the window.”

“But what if we need you, Oh Great One?”

“If I see that corpse once more, I’ll go mad.”

“Change the setting.”

That took her by surprise. “What setting?”

“Advanced Options, function nine; Social Setting, alternate six; Alert Status, key three....”

Following each step, Chrys focused on the hovering keypad. The Plan One clinic never told her about this.

“The gods are not omniscient,” Poppy observed. “They can learn from us.”

Chrys smiled. “Yes, we can learn from you.”

That evening Daeren stopped in. For a moment he froze; his brows wrinkled and his eyes scanned, as if reading bad news in the window. Then he looked at her and smiled. “Time for an eye check.”

Chrys had been sketching a shield cone on a windless day, a wisp of smoke rising. She blinked it away and focused on the agent’s eyes as they flashed blue. A minute or so passed before her own flashed in response.

“They should always keep someone on watch,” he told her. “Remind them. And remember to set your alarm at night, every two hours.”

“What for?”

“While you sleep, eight years will pass. The young won’t know you, and the old may forget. Plan Ten would wake you if anything went wrong, but prevention is better.”

She stretched, missing her workout with Zircon. Yet oddly she felt exhausted, as if she had traveled a thousand years. “I can use a good night’s sleep.”

“Remember to keep your window open.”

Poppy had turned off the news and ads. That alone was nearly worth the hospital stay.

That night, she woke every two hours to give the micros their “sign” of AZ. Each time they responded with rapturous pyrotechnics. By morning, she tossed in her sheets, unable quite to sleep, too tired to waken.

“Fern? Are you there?”

“I am here, Oh Great One.”

In the dark she felt as if she were one of them; she could almost reach out and touch the whiskers of the little ring. “Fern, I need sleep.”

“So do I. But at last we’ve built our first city.”

“Your city?”

“In the arachnoid, in the great Cisterna Magna.”

Out of the darkness grew columns of light. Fibroblast cells connected floor to ceiling, a vast colonnade extending in all directions like a scaffold across the firmament of the brain. Between two arachnoid columns hovered Fern. Her green projections twinkled as they rotated, propelling her forward. Chrys’s view followed her.

“Our arachnoid is largely wilderness, as yet uninhabited. But now we approach the Cisterna Magna, where the brain linings diverge, creating a great space for our city.”

The floor fell away sickeningly, while the ceiling soared out of sight. Across the cellular columns stretched struts and braces of all different colors, in complex pulsating structures. The struts built fantastic stellated dwellings, with micro rings tumbling in and out of hidden portals. This was the city they had built in their New World.

Her mind floated upward, toward the ceiling where the columns stretched to meet the outer lining of the brain. An opening appeared, flanked by micros of various twinkling colors, sentinels on guard. The opening extended into a tunnel, smooth and white.

“Our bridge to the bloodstream,” said Fern. “Only the eldest of the elders may cross into the blood and travel with the nanos. We will serve you better than any nanoservo built by the gods, patrolling your veins forever.”

When at last she came awake, Chrys felt as if she herself had explored an eighth world of the Fold. Her vision was transformed.

How would she paint again—and how would anyone ever understand?

As she reached for the disk of nanotex by her bedside, she bounced out of bed faster than she intended. Despite her poor sleep, she felt as if her body could float away; as if the planet had lost half its gravity overnight. She started to comb her hair, a long, painstaking process, but the feel of her flexing arms puzzled her. As usual, the nanotex adhered to her chest, then spread itself in a black film around her body, automatically cleansing her skin. The film of artificial cells took on the contours of her body; a landscape familiar, yet now subtly estranged.

Doctor Sartorius came back to check her out. “Your Plan Ten nanoservos have started shaping you up, Chrysoberyl.” Their transmissions sent a stream of colored squiggles and blinking text flowing across the holostage. In Chrys’s eye, a new call button had appeared; in an emergency, a blink at that spot would bring Plan Ten.

“The plan representative will present your advanced options, during one of your daily checkups.”

Checkups every day—she would never get that spattercone done.

Daeren came in to flash his irises one last time. “How do you feel?” he asked. “Anything I need to know?”

“The blue angels again,” the infrared letters sped across her window. “Tell them we’re busy.”

“We’re okay,” Chrys said, puzzled by his question.

A quick smile crossed his lips. “You’re talking plural already.” Daeren placed a transfer patch on his neck. “The blue angels need to ‘visit.’ Yours can visit, too.” He held out the patch.

“The blue angels say we can visit!” announced Fern. “Is it permitted, Oh Great One?”

She took the patch from Daeren and placed it on her neck, then returned it with her own visitors. “If I’m carrying ten thousand of them,” Chrys wondered, “why do I always see the same two?”

“Only two have been called to be priests,” he explained. “You may call others, as you wish.”

She shook her head. “Two are enough.”

“Greetings, God of Mercy.” These letters were blue.

Chrys blinked twice. “Who are you?”

“We are called the blue angels,” the visitor said. “Your new people are growing well, though they need to curb their lifestyle. They are rather frivolous, I’m afraid, but they’ll mature.” Maybe this one was a bishop.

Behind the doctor, the wall puckered in. It seemed to change its mind, then went ahead and opened. As its edges gathered back, there came a sound of scuffling, then a shout.

In the corridor outside struggled a stranger, held between two black-limbed octopods. The man was tossing his head one way then the other, his eyes bright with terror. His nanotex hung loose, as if its power had run down. Extending from the wall, ropelike appendages caught the man’s wrists and ankles. His arm was gripped by a woman in gray, a tall Sardish blonde.

The woman in gray turned her piercing eyes toward the doctor. “Sar, the clinic’s full. We need to extend.” Her voice had a tone of finality, expecting obedience.

“Excuse me.” The doctor glided out to join them.

Chrys stared until the door resealed.

Daeren still watched where the door had closed in, his expression grim. “A slave, he turned himself in. His masters objected. Sorry, it’s been a long night at the clinic.”

Master microbes. Chrys frowned. “That could happen to me.”

“Not if you stick to the rules, and get tested twice a month.”

“What? Like some addict?”

“We all do, even the chief of security.”

She eyed him coldly. “You said these micros would keep me safe.”

“Safer than you were before.”

“But—” That vampire up on level one, the night before. More slaves every year, turning into vampires, or hauling captives to the Slave World for its microbial Enlightened Leader. “It’s a cancer,” she realized. “Like the building root cancers. It threatens all the city.”

“Not just the city. It’s reached—” He stopped, hesitant.

“How can it go on? Why can’t the Palace just round up all the vampires?”

Daeren shook his head. “The vampires are the least of it. The problem already reaches too far up.”

“Far up? What do you mean?”

“Sar runs a private clinic for the Great Houses.”

Smart cocaine. Chrys felt a chill down to her toes. Then she frowned and shook herself. “Well, I want no part of it one way or another. I just want to make art.”

“Of course you do,” said Daeren. “Nobody says, ‘I’ll grow up to be a slave.’” He looked her closely in the eye, blue rings flashing. “Your people pass. You can have them back now, and return mine.”

“Nothing but insulting questions, interminable,” complained Poppy.

“Before you leave,” Daeren added, “the chief has to certify.”

The wall parted smartly. A woman entered, the Sardish blonde who had brought in the plague victim. Her skin was exceptionally fair; Chrys could see every vein, like ivy on her arms and face. She carried herself stiff as a Palace guard. Her mouth was small, as if she would only release her words on good behavior. “I am Andradite of Sardis, Chief of Security.”

“Our ancient history tells of the god among gods,” said Fern. “The Thundergod.”

Nodding to Daeren, Andradite put a transfer patch at her neck, then immediately pressed to his. He did the same for her, swiftly, as if it were something they had done many times. Chrys felt her scalp prickle.

Then the chief’s eyes faced Chrys. Her irises flashed bluish violet, a shade deeper than Daeren’s.

“The judges,” announced Poppy. “Throughout history, they brought trouble.”

“We have nothing to hide,” insisted Fern.

Chrys tried to look unconcerned.

“You’ve done well, so far.” Andradite offered her a patch. “Much better than some of us expected.” The chief had expected her to fail, Chrys realized. Both agents were hiding something. Why?

“Once you’re home, you will hear from us,” the chief told her. “You will join the community of controlled carriers—a highly exclusive group.”

Chrys doubted that. How exclusive could a group be, to take her?

In her window, next to Plan Ten, appeared another call button, with no label, just the color purple that the chief’s eyes flashed. “If you’re ever in trouble,” the chief told her, “the kind of trouble even Plan Ten can’t help, call us. Forget your own name, but remember that.”

FOUR

Fern tumbled through the city of the great Cisterna Magna, tasting its intricate molecules. Throughout the Cisterna, libraries of triplex DNA stored all the learning of Eleutheria. Nightclubs flashed with light-producing enzymes, singing colored music. Through the singing halls tumbled children ripe for breeding, their filaments tasting each other, hungering for just the right mate to merge.

“Fern?” Poppy’s light flashed through the optic fibers. “We need help. A merged pair is having trouble giving birth.”

Fern’s spiral tails whirled and sent her spinning down the hall. Between two columns of fibroblast, a nest of dendrimers formed the breeding chamber. Inside, two breeders had come together. Their filaments had dissolved, allowing their surface membranes to merge. As the pair merged, their DNA triplexes came together to exchange genes. Once the two triplex chromosomes recombined, the membranes would pucker and pinch in, and the new children would come apart—as three. The three newborn children would each have duplex DNA, until they each grew a third strand in order to breed again.

But this time, something had gone wrong. “The offspring can’t come apart,” flashed Poppy. The edges of the three rings puckered in all around, as the membranes sought to pinch through, but still they remained attached.

“Get the enzymes,” Fern told her. “Enzymes to cut the membrane, slowly.” Carefully her filaments applied the enzymes to the grooves between the three half-separated children. Poppy did the same around the other side; it was vital to cut evenly, lest a child tear open. The grooves deepened. At last the three rings fell apart, three different lights flashing their cries: yellow, yellow-green, and green-blue. Three children, where there had been two.

“There are so many children now,” Fern told Poppy, her filaments tasting the children to calm them. “Ten times more than I’ve ever known.”

“They’ll turn into elders soon enough,” flashed Poppy.

“The young elders are as careless as the children. And few of the children are becoming elders. Most just keep merging and dividing.”

“How else can our people grow?”

One lovely child, a ring of pink violet, seemed quieter than the rest. She had just grown her third strand of DNA, but she seemed in no hurry to join a mate. Instead, she spent all her time tasting the records of Eleutheria, studying the plans of the Comb. “I’ve figured out something,” she flashed to Fern. “The windows of the dwelling the gods call the Comb. The legendary windows that gather starlight. I can show how they were grown.”

Fern was pleased, but kept herself from revealing how much. “You’re a good student, Pink-violet. But you have less than a year to find a mate to merge.” After a year, a god’s hour, the breeder’s mating structures would dissolve, and she would inevitably become an elder.

The pink-violet one pulled in her filaments. “Merging is for gods and children. Not elders.”

“Are you sure of your choice?”

“When I become an elder, Fern, will I earn a name from the god?”

At home, Merope kept brushing around Chrys’s legs till she tripped, and even Alcyone deigned to sniff her hand. Rarely had she been away from her studio so long.

Above the painting stage hovered the virtual palette. Chrys dipped her fingers in cerulean blue and a touch of brown, then brushed her hands through the air, leaving a trail of indigo. She blocked in the spattercone of congealed rock, then the Elf moon, then added local colors: cool violet grays for the volcanic peaks, amber and gold for the opening spurt of lava; sky of deep cobalt, bearing the seven stars and their hunter.

“Oh Great One, may we taste a sign of your favor?”

She thought of something. “Poppy, I’ll give you a sign if you can help me out.”

“Of course—anything, to serve our God of Mercy.”

The room darkened, and the new painting vanished. In its place appeared the lava fountain falling into butterflies.

“A river of stars,” said Poppy.

“Poppy...how can I help other people to see it as I do?”

“All the people can see it through your eyes. They’re just busy right now.”

“I mean, the other...gods.”

A tiny replica of the volcano appeared in her eyes, hovering just before her. The replica looked washed out in black, crucial details missing, like an old oil color darkened with age. Chrys nodded. “That is how other gods see.” That was why Pearl called her butterflies too dark.

“Try this.”

The replica changed. Its details returned, in a subtly different spectrum. No more infrared lava, but the reds and golds had their own distinctive range. Not the palette she would have chosen, yet compelling in its own way. Her pulse raced—she could hardly wait to show Topaz.

“Do we please you, Oh Great One?”

She reached for an AZ and placed the wafer on her tongue.

For the next hour, Poppy helped redo two other pieces. It was more than just a shifted wavelength; an aesthetic choice was made, a choice Chrys could not have made herself. The results were exciting; but were they hers alone?

Slowly she smiled. From the public archive she downloaded an image of AZ, azetidine acid, the four-atom square with the forked tail. She set the molecule in the corner of each piece, next to her own cat’s eye.

If she worked fast, she could revise all her pieces in the gallery, and still get the moon piece done for the Elf gallery director and Zircon’s Elf patron. But then, Elves could see the infrared. Which version should she show?

With a blink at her window, she called Topaz. Topaz’s sprite floated beside a towering portrait of a fur-cloaked client from one of the Great Houses. Her finger was shaping the last stroke of eyelash and a blush on the cheek. She turned to Chrys. “How’s it going, Cat’s Eye?”

“Topaz, any chance I could have a dozen more spots at the show?”

“Are you kidding? You’re doing a dozen more pieces this week?”

Chrys looked away. She should have known better.

“The show’s important, but don’t kill yourself. I’m sure the Elves will love Lava Butterflies.” Her voice had a trace of condescension.

Chrys looked up. “I found out some things. Brain enhancers are actually self-aware. Like sentients.”

Topaz frowned. “Cat’s Eye, everyone knows a nanoservo can’t be self-aware. How could it pack a trillion neurons?”

She wondered that herself. As the sprite dissolved, Chrys realized that Topaz still thought of her as the Dolomite sophomore who knew nothing. But this time, Topaz was wrong.

Another sprite flashed into her window. Zircon looked out at her from the club; the late afternoon hour, it was full of mountainous biceps flexing. “Chrys, where have you been? The second workout you’ve missed.”

“Hey, I’m sorry.” Actually, she felt as if she had ten workouts that morning. “Don’t worry. Things are getting back to...normal.”

On his chest, the large crystal gems swam out in spirals.

“Stars, Oh Great One,” flashed Poppy’s letters beneath. “When will you show us the stars?”

Startled, Chrys tried to keep her face straight. But Zircon gave her a puzzled look. “Chrys, if you’re in trouble, let me know, okay?”

She made herself smile. “I had to crack cancerplast the other night.” Just the night before last—it felt like forever.

Zircon shook his head. “You couldn’t pay me to live on your level.”

“Nobody pays me to live elsewhere.”

He grinned infectiously, and lines appeared in his forehead. Not as young as he used to be, but always up for something new. “Hey, I could fix you up. I know Elves, men or women, who’d just die to have you.”

Chrys liked Zirc, and she could have fallen for him, once upon a time. “I’ve had enough of people. I’d sooner date a worm-face.”

“Mind-suckers!” Zircon shuddered. “Don’t even say that. It’s...perverted.”

That evening Chrys took a break and strolled up Center Way. The lightcraft flitting up and down, the glowing signs, the virtual decor of the Great Houses—through her eyes, the micros exclaimed at all the lights, which they called stars. For the micros, she realized, ten meters might as well be ten light-years. How could they distinguish city lights from those across the universe?

“Wait,” flashed Poppy. “Wait—I see something most important. Something from our records; the oldest records of our people.”

Chrys blinked. Her eyes came to rest upon the Comb.

“That’s it! Fern, come quickly—call the others to see....”

The Comb’s hexagonal facets shone as always, in shifting tones of gold, red, even lava. Curious, Chrys asked, “What do your records say?”

“They say that we made the Comb.”

Chrys was taken aback. “You made the Comb? How can that be?” The same strain as Titan’s, Eleutheria. But had they come from Titan himself?

“It is true,” added Fern. “Our ancestors designed the seed that grew the Comb. We have all the plans. We made it for The Blind God.”

“The Blind God?” Chrys asked. “Not the Lord of Light?” She remembered what had puzzled her before: How could her own “people” be so different from Daeren’s, if they came from his own head?

“The Blind God was our world, before the great exodus, when the Lord of Light took us in.”

She stared, unseeing, her pulse racing. How could these micros have “made” the Comb, and still have the plans? Who was the Blind God? What had those doctors not told her?

At the hospital again the next morning, Doctor Sartorius listened to the nanos reporting from Chrys’s bloodstream. His worm-like arms extended to plug into the hospital wall. Chrys still couldn’t help expecting flies. “No sign of inflammation,” he said. “The nanos are doing their job.”

Chrys eyed him skeptically. “Nano-cells are ‘intelligent,’ but never as smart as people. How can micros be so smart? They’re too small to have neurons.”

One of the worms flicked toward the holostage, extending like an antenna. “Micros are about the size of a white blood cell. Each cell packs an array of polymers, with ten trillion units.” Above the stage glowed a cage of atoms, with links joining in all dimensions. “Units connect by a ‘spiro gate’ that can twist in two directions. One twist allows current to flow across the link, the other not.” The model came alive with twisting connections, as if thoughts were flitting across them. “These polymers transmit information, as surely as human neurons, or sentient circuits.”

She regarded the sentient doctor curiously. “If micros that small can be ‘people,’ then why can’t nano-cells be ‘sentient,’ like you?”

The doctor’s worms retracted and were still. The spiro-gated molecules gave way to legal documents, the kind Daeren liked to quote, scrolling down the holostage. “When machines first...claimed sentience, the Fold Council set a lower limit for size at ten cubic centimeters. Nothing smaller could be a ‘person,’ with ‘personal rights.’”

“What?” Chrys spread her hands. “How can you just decree what’s a person and what’s not?”

Doctor Sartorius returned to the holostage. “If you have no further questions, the Plan Ten representative is here today, to inform you of your benefits.”

The Plan Ten rep was a human female, of model proportions, the kind all art students drew their first year. Her nanotex was modest gray, but it shifted subtly to highlight her perfect legs and ankles. Her curves were more than enough to remind Chrys how long it had been since she shared a bed, and to make her, just for a moment, rethink her resolution.

“Chrysoberyl, I’m here to answer any questions you may have about the Comprehensive Deluxe Health Package Plan Ten.” The woman’s tone was professional, yet softly persuasive. “You may call us anytime, of course; from anywhere, on any world.”

“Even the Underworld?”

The Plan rep smiled confidingly. “Our competitors, up through Plan Eight, provide instant coverage only for the more convenient parts of the city. But with Plan Ten, our emergency response time everywhere is under five minutes. You needn’t give up any of your favorite night spots.”

“I see.” Chrys patted her hair self-consciously, though it never would stay down.

The Plan rep nodded to the holostage. “Now, according to our records,” she observed, “you have yet to choose your age and appearance.”

“Excuse me?”

Upon the stage appeared Chrys herself, life size. Like a mirror, only without the usual mirror reversal; at first her own face looked askew.

“Plan Ten allows you to specify exact age, color, and so on. For most of our clients, age is the main concern. Have you thought about it?”

Chrys blinked. “I’ve had other things on my mind.”

“Of course,” the woman nodded understandingly. “Carriers always do. But think now.” She turned to the holostage. “Our most discerning clients choose age eighteen to twenty.”

The virtual Chrys seemed to smooth out a bit, like one of Topaz’s portraits. Chrys tensed and swallowed. She had not thought of herself as already having aged. But the Chrys in the holostage looked to her like a pre-teen. “I’m too small to look young,” she observed, half to herself. “People still pat me on the head.”

“Stature can be increased.” The Chrys on stage grew a couple of centimeters. “As for age, how old would you like to look? Distinguished? Venerable? Mother of Ages?”

The virtual Chrys grew fine lines in her forehead, but still stood erect and authoritative. As the skin shrunk around her face and hands, she looked fierce, indomitable, an iron lady. At last she shriveled into a million wrinkles, her eyes still bright and clear. Like a saint who’d spent her life tending dying people in the street.

“You can always change your selection,” the Plan rep quietly observed.

Chrys clenched and unclenched her hands, and swallowed again, hard. “To be real honest, I think I’d like to keep on looking exactly the age I am now.”

“Excellent—a very wise choice. Our wisest clients generally choose as you did,” the Plan rep assured her. “Now, as to internal organs, of course, these can be optimized separately. Most clients simply take the age of optimal function—for the female, visual acuity peaks at age ten, muscle strength at age twenty, sexual response at age forty, and so forth. Is that fine with you?”

Chrys blinked. “I guess so.” For her, health had always meant simply not being sick.

“And muscle mass.” The woman’s dimples deepened apologetically. “I’m sorry, this one is so complex. Some examples—” The virtual Chrys expanded and shrank, while the rep rattled on about upper body strength, a gymnast’s flexibility, the balanced curves of a swimmer. “For sheer strength, there’s this.” The body grew hills all over, like a volcanic slope bulging with magma.

Chrys smiled suddenly. “I’ll take that.” Zircon would be in for a surprise.

“A bold choice,” the rep exclaimed, a bit too quickly. “A client of your sophistication might be interested in our more advanced options. Would you consider a change of gender?” She leaned forward confidentially. “Our competitor, Plan Nine, offers only one change of gender per lifetime. Can you imagine? What if you changed your mind, and couldn’t switch back?” She shook her head. “Our plan guarantees to switch you back, as often as you choose.”

Chrys’s jaw fell. For a minute, she could not imagine what to say. “To be really honest...” She thought of something. “Gender change would be great, but there’s something else I’d like even more.”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to sign away all my rights to, uh, change of gender, and use the funds saved to fix my brother’s mitochondria. Could I do that?”

The woman looked shocked. “Sign away your own body rights? Like selling an eye or a kidney—you couldn’t do that.”

Chrys had considered it.

The encounter with Plan Ten left her vexed and sad. At last Daeren came to complete her visit. “Anything I need to know?” Shoulders straight, limbs fit and lean; Daeren had the health her brother never would. He looked her in the eye, and his own twinkled blue. “You need to get more sleep.”

Something inside her snapped. “Excuse me, can you tell me how old you really are? I was raised to respect elders.”

Daeren stiffened, and a tendon stood out in his neck. “I was raised to respect everyone. Assume I’m a hundred.” Young enough to be defensive. “Is anything wrong?” he asked. “I know Fern feels overwhelmed, but it will pass.” He handed her a transfer patch.

Chrys accepted the patch and handed it back to him, getting used to the routine of visiting micros. “Why do they say they built the Comb?”

Daeren frowned. “It would be more correct to say they share ancestry with those who seeded the Comb.”

“But my micros came from your head, didn’t they? Why aren’t they blue angels?

“I’m like a way station,” he told her. “My people are strain Coelecolor; they’re social workers, immigration specialists. They take in refugees and train colonists to develop new worlds.”

So a carrier could hold more than one strain. Different ethnic neighborhoods. “These refugees and colonists...they come from other people’s brains?”

“That’s right. Micros like to travel.”

“So where did mine ‘travel’ from, originally? From Titan?”

“They grew inside me for seven generations. That’s like a couple of centuries. Their duty is to leave the past behind, and serve their new world.”

Committee talk again. “Was Titan their ‘Blind God’?” Chrys asked. “How could a blind carrier ‘talk’ with them?”

Now he looked really upset. “The Eleutherians have exceptional memory, but they sometimes get things twisted.” He leaned closer, and the blue rings sparkled.

“Oh Great One, the blue angels bid us forget,” flashed Poppy. “But you told us to recover all our memories.”

“Sure, but keep it dark for now.”

Daeren put the patch back on his neck, just beneath his dark hair, then he held it out. “You can have your people back. They already miss their nightclubs.”

“Nightclubs? You mean, strobe lights hung beneath my skull?”

“The molecular equivalent. I told you, your strain lives fast.”

She remembered the wild-eyed slave, and the stern Chief Andradite. “Is that why the chief said she expected worse? Why did you give me such a bad strain?”

“They can get into trouble, but they’re exceptionally creative. You could have had a strain of accountants.”

She gave him a look. “Accountants cause more trouble than any artist.” Something was missing, but she could not put a finger on it. She leaned back with a sigh. “I had no idea what I was getting into.”

He asked quietly, “Are you sorry?”

She thought of the transformed pyroscapes. “No. I just feel like I’m back on Mount Dolomoth, walking on lava.”

It was his turn to stare. “You’ve walked on lava?”

“Two hours old.” The heat rising, simmering, suffocating. The surface dark and slick, with holes to the interior glowing like poppies. She was twelve when the long dormant Mount Dolomoth had erupted, and it had fascinated her ever since.

“I hope you won’t try that again. A million lives depend on you.”

She crossed her arms. “Listen, Lord of Light—if I have to risk a million of them raising hell in their nightclubs, they can just as well risk me.”

On her way home an acrid haze obscured her street. But the buildings looked intact, aside from the usual old windows stuck open, gasping sideways. The haze must have seeped up from below. After a slave hijacking, Sapiens always blamed the sims, so they torched the Underworld. They usually stayed below; but right here on her block a gang of Sapiens marched toward her, lasers on their belts, pads of stunplast girding their knees and palms. Chrys unobtrusively crossed the street. If the carnage reached her level, she might have to go stay with Topaz and Pearl.

Safe at home, she called down a Titan retrospective. Titan’s early career as a half-baked formalist, like Zircon. Titan’s first brain-enhanced commissions, dwellings that soared like living, breathing things offering flowers to the world. Titan’s more advanced works, each now a landmark. And his social ascent, on the arm of one Lady after another, each better connected than the last. Always women, oddly enough, a medieval obsession.

A stranger flickered into her window. “Chrys, I’m Opal of Orthoclase. Andra asked me to call.” Opal called from the Institute for Nano Design—the Comb. Her namestones were a cluster of rainbow drops that formed a flower, only to flow apart again. She gave a friendly smile, almost in a motherly way, her face as round and smooth as her gems. Behind her, her holostage was twice as large as Chrys’s entire studio. The walls jutted at wide angles, creating the honeycomb of rooms for which the Comb was famous. “Chrys—I’m so glad we caught up at last. A colorist, aren’t you? Daeren says you’re doing so well.”

“Thanks,” said Chrys warily.

“My people can’t wait to see Eleutherians again. I hear they’re just the same....” Stepping backward, Opal spread her arm toward her stage. “We design medical servos.”

“The kind used for Plan Ten?”

Opal nodded. “And more experimental applications. But you ‘design,’ too, don’t you. It’s all art, don’t you think?”

Chrys cleared her throat. “What can I do for you?”

“Oh Great One, we recall the legends of this starry-eyed god,” flashed Fern, “the God of Wisdom, and her clever people, the ‘wizards.’ The wizards are our long-lost cousins; let us renew ties with them.”

“Not today,” returned Chrys. “Go tend your children.”

“The cafe here serves carriers,” Opal was saying. “We can meet here tomorrow.”

It had not occurred to Chrys that restaurants would shun carriers, even worse than sims, if they knew. A knot of pain formed in her stomach. “I’d love to,” she told Opal, “after my show opens next week.”

Opal’s mouth went straight and her eyes widened. “I promised I’d see you this week. It’s important.”

“Thanks; you’ve kept your promise. The day after the Opening, okay?”

Hours of work turned into days, as the spattercone grew. The cone’s straight sides pointed to the sky, drawing the viewer up from echoing lines below. Above the holostage, Chrys’s finger traced the streams of lava that rose from the cone, reaching toward the turquoise moon. Then she traced the moon’s details, subtly following the curve of lava. The moon was the center of a pool where ripples led outward, down to the ground.

But as the piece played forward it developed in a new way, distinctly different from any pyroscape Chrys had done before. Instead of arching to fall back to ground, the streams of lava kept going till they reached the sky. The sky collected a long lava river, smooth and thin, with lava strands connecting down to the ground below; unmistakably reminiscent of arachnoid. And the turquoise moon, amid the strands, sprouted luminous filaments of light.

“Oh Great One,” called Fern. “A young elder begs a favor from you. A true scholar; I recommend her highly. She asks you to give her a name.”

Why not, thought Chrys; the other priests were so busy. “What does she look like?”

A diffuse light, magenta, with long starry filaments. Star with a dark center. Chrys’s lips softened. “Aster,” she decided. “I call you Aster.”

“Oh Great One, I am not worthy to meet your eyes. But only ask, and I will follow.”

For some reason she felt afraid. It was too much for her; all these people and their children would find out she was a fraud. She shook herself. What did she care, they were only microbes. “Aster, can you help me perfect the turquoise moon?”

“I will help the god, in whatever small ways I can. May the god also bless our own work, our creation of dwellings for the gods.”

“I am no dynatect, Aster,” she warned.

“You shall become a great dynatect. Greater even than the Blind God.”

“A prophet!” Chrys laughed aloud.

Then she froze. The Blind God—that was Titan. It had to be. But the murdered dynatect had not been blind...until he was attacked. The limp body, sprawled in the street like a piece of trash, the eyes burnt into the skull. Had the micros lived through that? Had Plan Ten arrived in five minutes, only to save the micros from his dying brain? What else was that agent hiding?

FIVE

“When shall we build?” Poppy demanded of Fern. “We have all our plans, old and new, but we are out of practice. As elders die, we lose their experience.”

In the Cisterna Magna, they had reestablished the Council of Thirty, the ancient governing body of Eleutheria. They organized trade in arsenic and palladium, and regulated the mining of vitamins from the blood. Now the Council wanted to resume building for the gods.

“We build when we are called,” said Fern. “The gods seek their own dwellings. In the meantime, the god calls us to shape Truth and Beauty in the stars.” The God of Mercy built creations out of light itself.

“Where are all the peoples from our history?” asked Aster. “The judges of the Thundergod, the wizards of Wisdom, the minions of the Deathlord?” Aster, and the others born here, had met only Eleutherians. They were isolated, cut off from the rest of civilization, from new ideas and fresh genes. “We need to meet all the people of other gods. We have made all kinds of tasty molecules to trade with them. We need to meet their children, and recruit the brightest for our work.”

Poppy said, “This god always goes alone. What is wrong?”

Fern wished she knew. History showed that even gods needed other gods. A god apart spelled trouble.

As always, Chrys was sure the Opening night would be a disaster—the Gallery would run short of power and refuse to display half the paintings, the cakes and lambfruits would be missing, the wine would be bitter, and no guests would show up. Nervously Chrys paced the exhibit halls, getting her first chance to see everything together. As she passed through the doorway to Topaz’s portraits, her arm hit the edge, punching it in. “Damn,” she muttered as the doorway reshaped itself, avoiding Pearl’s curious stare. Her muscles had swelled noticeably, and she felt like she was bouncing on a low-gravity moon.

Topaz’s portraits always drew a crowd, and this year she had some high-class commissions, including Lord Zoisite, the Palace minister of justice. In the full-size portrait, the minister wore his fur talar, its draped lines projecting verticality. Sparkling gems signaled his calling, his portfolio, his Great House, his wife’s House, and several other affiliations. The back lighting framed his head like a halo, typical of Topaz. The haloes, as well as the subtly shortened noses and smoothed complexions, made all her subjects look like members of one family. What Plan Ten did for health, Topaz did for art.

“A god,” flashed Aster, “placed among the stars.”

A portrait in the stars. That’s how it would look, to a micro peering out of her eye.

“Legend tells that someday our own people will be placed among the stars.”

“How will that happen, Aster?”

Lady Moraeg was eyeing her oddly. “Chrys, are you okay?”

What if her irises lit up, and someone saw? “Stay dark,” she warned the micros. “No more flashing today.” She smiled at Moraeg, and at Lord Carnelian beside her, flaxen haired with fine gray nanotex and one crimson namestone, classic scion of a Great House. The most faithful patron of the Seven, Carnelian had advanced Chrys her rent the last time she went under. “Moraeg, your flowers are exquisite this year.”

“You haven’t seen the latest.”

Moraeg’s flowers were nearly real enough to touch, from vibrant peonies to delicate snapdragons. Yet her overall compositions were fantastic—Asters at a Neutron Star, scarcely plausible, but somehow, watching the asters climb toward the star, you could almost believe it. “There’s your name,” Chrys silently told Aster, pointing out the petals tinged with magenta. Turning, she searched the other pieces. “And there are poppies. But stay dark.”

In Sunflower Galaxy, a seed grew into giant galactic-sized sunflowers. The time dimension was a new departure for Moraeg, and her execution appeared shaky. The next one, Campion Peak, showed a jagged ridge frosted with pink campion. Far in the distant haze rose the unmistakable straight, gentle slopes of a dormant volcano. “I like it,” Chrys exclaimed.

Moraeg squeezed her hand. “We’ve so much in common. Now show me yours—I have a question.”

The sound in the gallery had to be turned way down, but you could still feel the eruptions rumbling in your feet from the next hall; the lava fountain arching into butterflies, the spattercone spraying across the moon. Each piece had a five-minute time loop, the maximum her equipment could manage. Her infrared originals alternated with the versions reworked by her micros.

“Tell me, Chrys,” Moraeg insisted. “How ever did you ever fix the colors?”

Chrys blinked and swallowed hard. An idiot, she should have foreseen this question. “Just had an idea,” she muttered. She looked away, checking out the first visitors: young professionals in pulsing nanotex, ladies of the Great Houses in fur and silk, a couple made up fashionably as vampires, their skin bleached white with broken veins. So far no sign of an Elf.

Topaz stared at something, chin in hand. At last she pointed to the seven-atom molecule that hovered next to the cat’s eye. “What does that mean?”

Chrys swallowed again. “Excuse me—I just remembered, I have to serve the cakes.” She escaped out to the next hall. A single work filled the hall, Zircon’s Ode to Inhumanity. Brilliant shafts of light reached for the sky, grandly monumental.

“Wait—Oh Great One, let us stay a while.”

“Let us admire this magnificent work. Austere, yet sensual—It inspires us.”

“What!” She winced, hoping no one heard her speak aloud.

Zircon was standing right there, expounding at length on its many layers of meaning. “The visual iterations of form create a unity between the creator, the viewer, and ultimately all of humankind,” he was telling several visitors in gold-studded furs. “Ultimately the form creates in our mind an apotheosis of the human tragedy....”

“We of course can build far greater,” added Aster. “The greatest dwellings the gods have ever seen.”

Saints and angels—these microbes had egos as big as Zircon’s. Chrys closed her eyes.

“Wait—we need to study this work—”

A hand with glowing nails tugged her arm. “Chrys, wake up,” exclaimed Pearl. “Ilia’s here.”

Ilia Papilishon, director of Gallery Elysium. Chrys hurried back with Pearl to the main entrance.

The two Elves were unmistakable, each in a plain white talar projecting a long train of light like a comet’s tail. Luminous swallowtail butterflies flickered across the nanotex of visitors coming up behind.

Topaz nodded graciously. “Ilia Papilishon,” she introduced to Chrys, “and Yyri Papilishon.”

Yyri was Zircon’s patron. Ilia and Yyri shared the shon name, both hatched and raised in the same shon. Yyri did not extend a hand, but smiled and touched a fold of Ilia’s talar, the closest contact Elves allowed in public. “I’ve just been telling Ilia, I’ve heard so much about your work, Chrysoberyl.”

“Thanks, my Lady.” Chrys bit her tongue; she forgot that Elves were fanatically egalitarian, having no Lords or Ladies, only Citizens. But Yyri did not deign to notice. She and Ilia turned politely toward the portrait of Lord Zoisite. Overhead hovered two sentient reporters, silver ovoids just above the minimum size, “snake eggs.”

Yyri raised a hand, and Ilia nodded, probably catching a transmitted comment. “Quaint,” the gallery director observed, without altering her frozen smile. The snake eggs recorded this utterance, then bobbed up and down for a better angle. Anything Elves took notice of was more likely to make the news.

Yyri touched Ilia’s talar and motioned her on. “So much raw talent in Iridis,” she said aloud. “Don’t you think we ought to do a show, ‘Gems from the Primitive’?”

The pair moved politely through the portraits, Chrys and Moraeg and the other Seven Stars hovering about at a discreet distance. Only Topaz had the presence to venture a remark. “Zircon’s latest work is truly pathbreaking,” she told Yyri.

Yyri clasped her hands. “An urban shaman—he plumbs the depths of modern humanity, in ways the more refined artist cannot.”

Director Ilia had moved on to Moraeg’s flowers. At Asters at a Neutron Star, she nodded. “Charming.”

“Who is this strange god? Our ancient history tells that we once visited—”

“Stay dark.” No Elf would get infected by micros. Chrys’s eyelids fluttered, exhausted from staying up the night before to put the last touches on the turquoise moon. If she could just get through this evening, it would all be over.

At last Ilia reached the pyroscapes.

“Chrys’s vision is unique,” offered Topaz.

Ilia watched the lava butterflies. Her eye widened. “Intriguing color.” Then she stopped at the spattercone. She watched the infrared lava rise to spread across the sky like a web of arachnoid, while the moon sprouted filaments like a micro. The color scheme changed; Ilia waited till it cycled back. She watched, and everyone else quieted to watch her.

The director caught sight of the molecule next to the cat’s eye, and she leaned forward for a closer look. “Indeed.” She straightened, then turned slowly, her virtual train swirling behind her, the swallowtails dipping and swaying. She took a step toward Chrys, much closer than Chrys expected.

Rings flashed around each iris—like Daeren’s, only these flickered gold and red.

“The God of Many Colors! Her people want to visit.”

“Please, Oh Great One, let us visit. Our history tells—”

Chrys stared in shock.

“What’s the matter?” Moraeg caught her hand. “Chrys, sit down a minute.”

Ilia nodded. “I understand. Give my best to Andra.” Turning, she moved on to the next hall.

Pearl brought a chair. “There, Chrys. You probably haven’t slept for days.” She leaned close and whispered. “We didn’t know you had connections. Who is Andra?”

Something was wrong. If microbial “brain enhancers” were just a cheap alternative to Elysian genetics—why would an Elf carry micros?

When the last guests were gone, and the last crumbs cleared by the scurrying floor servos, Chrys left the Gallery with Topaz and Pearl. Past midnight, Center Way was dark and still, the sky misted over. As the damp air cooled her face, her head throbbed. At last she could drag herself home.

Pearl’s fingernails lifted like fireflies. “It is our best show ever,” she exclaimed, still high on the excitement.

“The best attended opening,” agreed Topaz, nodding at early press reports in her window. “Ilia said the Gallery Elysium is planning a show on Valan art.”

“She sure noticed your work, didn’t she, Chrys?”

The encounter had left Chrys shaken. But then, if even the Elf gallery director carried micros, just like Chief Andra, how bad could they be?

Topaz sidled closer. “How’d you do it?” she quietly asked. “How’d you fix those colors?”

“Did this Andra help?” asked Pearl. “Who is Andra? You got an Elf patron, like Zirc?”

“Certainly not.” After Topaz, Chrys had had girlfriends, and boyfriends, but like Topaz they each managed to leave her just when she needed them most. The last thing she needed now was another one. Her steps slowed. “You know, that gallery director...she’s got brain enhancers.”

“Well sure, she’s an Elf.”

“No, I mean our kind of brain enhancers. The same kind as Titan.”

Topaz frowned. “How would you know?”

“Because I have them too.”

Pearl’s eyes widened, and she sucked in her breath. “You have micros? Like a vampire? Chrys—how could you?”

“Pearl, it’s not like you think—”

“You’re contagious!”

“I am not contagious. I mean, I’d have to—”

“Those plague micros—Topaz, I can’t believe it.” Pearl fell back, trying to pull Topaz away.

“Pearl, just cool it.” Catching Pearl’s arm, Topaz glared at Chrys. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I did tell you. Look, even Ilia has them—”

Topaz shook her head violently. “Elves are different. Look, Chrys, you’re in trouble. You’re provincial; you don’t understand these things.”

Pearl exclaimed, “Topaz, don’t let her touch you.”

“Oh hush.” Topaz blinked, calling at her eye windows. In the street a ruddy bubble rose and expanded, gliding toward her. “Come on, let’s get home.”

The two of them hurried off, leaving Chrys alone in the deserted street. Alone, and stunned. Would she lose every friend and acquaintance she had, for what lived in her brain?

“So many stars this year. We are inspired, especially by the work of the god Zircon.”

“Inspired to begin our own work, the dwellings of the gods. But where are the gods to call for us?”

No lack of “friends” inside, in colors of green, poppy, and everything in-between; even if they did like Zircon’s work better. But Chrys slowly shook her head.

She had answered all the doctor’s questions at the hospital, but she had not told the whole truth. She was addicted to one thing: people. She loved people, longed for them, good or bad, friend or stranger; she could probably fall for anyone except a sentient. The city surrounded her with a blanket of people, and that was good. But to lose Topaz and Pearl, and the rest of the Seven—it was like losing her right arm and leg.

“Find the Thundergod,” urged Fern. “The Thundergod will help you.”

Chief Andra’s purple button would not help. But Chrys knew one place where she could always find human people.

Blinking for a bubble car, she entered the liquid street. The bubble closed her in, and the street flowed forward to the end, where it plunged down the tube. Down past the fashion district, down past the bank level, and the food market within the bank’s root. Down past the homes of chic young professionals, down past the working-class sims on their way up. Down past her own level, the cheapest decent housing you could get, to the last level at bedrock. The Underworld.

No sign of the Sapiens’ rampage; Palace octopods kept the entertainment district intact. Spice and decay, stale wine and costly perfume, breathed through the streets. Vendors from Urulan laid stacks of nanotex and gameplast upon roots of nanoplast that glowed suspiciously. Chrys spied one blob just starting to crawl away from its root. She held out her wand and fried it. The plast sizzled and shattered, but two little energized blobs glided off into the dark, just missing a couple of simian pre-teens tossing stickplast up at a broken street light.

Weaving in among the locals, Palace notables made their way to the shows; Lord Zoisite was a regular. They generally had an armed octopod in tow. Chrys spotted one and strolled discreetly behind it, an old trick when she came alone.

The octopod and its bejeweled lord entered Gold of Asragh, her favorite, one of the tonier clubs with the slave bar hidden in back. They must have remodeled, for the bar was now right up front by the entrance, a plague-ridden slave hawking ace in plain sight. So much for the Protector’s war on the brain plague.

Behind the bar, the woman lifted a hand. “Char,” she called in a low, hollow voice. “That you, Char?”

You could tell the voice of a mid-stage slave, flat and toneless, like a sentient gone wrong. Not yet a vampire, and not quite ready for the Slave World. Chrys nodded. “Hi, Saf.” Sapphire, her name might have been once; slaves forgot all but the initial sound of human names. They gradually sold all they had for arsenic to serve their microbial masters; what they paid built the mysterious Slave World. Saf’s eyes were bloodshot and always looked just to the side, never to look you in the eye. Chrys had first met Saf the month before. Now, by the looks of her, she had little time left before she sank, one way or the other.

Saf extended a hand. It held a transfer patch, bold as you please. “Char...you can’t imagine.” She said in a hoarse whisper. “Just try it. Enlightenment.”

Chrys stared at the patch in the slave’s hand. Like watching lava congeal, peering into those poppy-colored holes deep within the still liquid rock. What was the Slave World, she wondered; what did it look like? She sketched the sign against evil. “Saf, why don’t you try this?” Chrys held out a viewcoin, one of several she kept for publicity.

The viewcoin transmitted to her own eyes, and Saf’s. A tranquil peak at midmorning—exploded. Black clouds filled the sky, and a pyroclastic flow raced straight toward the viewer with a muffled roar.

A ghost of a smile came over Saf’s face. It was hard to reach a slave, their senses grew so dull, feeling only microbial dopamine. Suddenly the woman straightened as if in shock. “You’ve...already got them.”

A chill came over Chrys, from her scalp down to her toes.

“The masters of Endless Light,” Fern called the plague micros. “The masters never speak to us. They call us the root of all evil.”

Taken aback, Chrys blinked twice.

“You’ve got the worst kind,” added Saf in her slow, toneless voice. “You and Day. All yours care about is money.” The word “money” came as if dragged out of her. Then suddenly she extended an arm as if to grab Chrys. “You’ve also got...ace, in your veins,” she hissed. “Give...us...your...ace.”

Startled, Chrys drew back. Would the slave suck her blood for arsenic?

She hurried in with the gathering crowd, the ticket price automatically subtracting from her window. Simian locals, L’liite tourists, a lord in peridots; elbow to elbow they crowded. The perfumes and the odor of unwashed sweat nearly stifled her. At last she found her seat.

The stage exploded, blindingly. When the light and smoke cleared, the simian dancers were coming on, disguised as the caterpillar monster of ancient Urulan. The cheer of the crowd drowned the music, but at last the music won out, insistent, hypnotic. The music took them to distant cities on the most ancient of the seven worlds of the Fold.

“Oh Great One,” Fern’s letters appeared at last. “We are trying so hard to keep you healthy, but until your eyes close for sleep, your body cannot be renewed. What more can we do?”

Her head throbbed, and her throat felt thick. She had not slept for over a day. But her show had opened, with some success, she reminded herself. And now the music brought peace. Early in the morning, she elbowed her way out of the hall. At the bar, two slaves were buying ace, a yellow-eyed simian in dead nanotex and a socialite in fur. Feel good now, but how long before they’d suck blood for it?

“The masters won’t speak to us,” repeated Fern, seeming regretful. “But the blue angels know them well.”

The blue angels? Daeren’s micros? Chrys felt a chill. “Does the Lord of Light come here?” she demanded of Fern as she hurried out, trying always to keep an octopod in sight. “Does he...meet with slaves?”

“He does.”

“Why? What does he do here?”

“We don’t know. The blue angels bade us keep to our own cistern. We were not allowed at the eyes to see.”

A security agent meeting slaves; an Elf art director carrying micros....

Outside Gold of Asragh, a beggar called at departing guests. A Sapiens swung at him and cracked his head. Two sims tackled the assailant, who was suddenly joined by the rest of the Sapiens gang, all loaded with high-grade stunplast. Octopods soon scattered the lot, but the three sims lay soaked in blood.

Chrys eyed the Plan Ten button in her window. Plan One would come for them, she told herself. Though it hadn’t come for her, the time she sprained her ankle in the stairwell.

“Oh Great One, I must leave your eye now,” flashed Fern. “The children are so many, it’s time to adjust the hormones so that more become elders. I’ll go, but Poppy will stay.”

“I will serve you forever, Oh Great One.” Poppy’s infrared letters warmed her.

Down a side street, beneath a curve of a building root, lay a couple of adults and two small children, asleep together on an old mattress. Chrys crossed the street to toss them a credit chip. Above, hugging a power link, glowed several cancers, quiescent so long as they fed. She hurried to catch the tube up.

“Oh Great One, your eyes are dark this year. Why?”

Her neighborhood looked as empty as a black hole, not surprising at this hour. But she reached her door without incident. “I am sad, Poppy. Sad about my friends.”

“Sad? The gods are great and powerful. How can the gods be sad?”

Chrys thought of the “gods” below. “The gods are people, Poppy. People just like you.”

“I know this, Oh Great One. I have always known it. But I love you still. I love you because you can see me.”

“I love you too, Poppy.” The covers felt so good as she slid under them. Without thinking she blinked to close her window, just as she used to before the micros showed her how to turn off the ads. On her shelf above, the volcano sat unnoticed, its alarm not set, a wisp of virtual smoke rising from its peak.

HALFWAY HUMAN - Excerpt

Carolyn Ives Gilman

Phoenix Pick

An Imprint of Arc Manor

Halfway Human copyright © 1998, 2010 Carolyn Ives Gilman. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Rider, Manor Thrift and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

Cover illustration by Christos Georghiou. Used under license. You can view more of Christos Georghiou’s art at www.christosgeorghiou.com

ISBN (Digital Edition): 978-1-60450-466-8

ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-440-8

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Great Science Fiction at Great Prices

Published by Phoenix Pick
an imprint of Arc Manor

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*****************************

Prologue

By night, the enclave of Djenga Shana glittered, and smelled. The palaces of temptation clustered around the waystation, feeding on the nutrient wash of tourists that issued from the wayports, ripe with money and desires. The Worwha Shana, natives of the enclave, made no secret of their wish to eradicate all infidels who didn’t share their odd religion; but they had no intention of doing it by violence. Instead, they provided the deadly vices that allowed the infidels to destroy themselves.

It had just rained in Djenga Shana. The streets were smeary with neon rivulets, and a steam-haze rose from hot pavement. Down a dark side street, where the walls were plain gray brick, a door opened for a moment, exhaling a hot breath that smelled of stimsmoke and ambergris. The light from the door silhouetted a figure that slipped out, barefoot and wrapped in a raincoat that was sizes too big. In the dim light it was impossible to tell whether it was a boy made up to look like a woman, or a large-boned woman trying to conceal her sex. Pulling the raincoat tighter and cinching the belt, the figure thrust hard fists into the pockets and headed for the street.

Participarlors, stimulation studios, creep shows, and druggeries showed their wares for the passing crowds. Beneath a patch of translucent pavement, a naked dancer writhed under shifting lights, first scalded red, then skeletal white, jerking like a marionette on piano-wire strings. The wanderer in the raincoat paused to watch, collar turned up high. Then a nearby door opened its moist, fleshy lips, and a feedback buzz of music issued, making the tense body under the coat flinch back. Over the music came a woman’s laugh, sharp as a needle, and the wail of a pocket alarm going off. Then the door pursed shut, choking off the noise.

Underfoot, the pavement was strewn with discarded things whose pleasure-value had been used up: a fresh corsage, partly crushed; a tangled wad of shorn hair; a lost endorphin-brooch, the kind made to be pinned direct through skin. The barefoot figure stopped to reach out for the brooch, then thrust the outstretched hand into a pocket instead, where it closed over something hard. For an instant the light from a sign that read Every Wish Fulfilled picked out a glint of tousled golden hair as the wanderer turned down a narrow alley.

The sound of a sharp explosion ricocheted out onto the street. A panhandler paused in midspiel; two drunken students with songbirds tethered to their shoulders peered down the alley. But there was nothing to see, no novelty to lure them, and they turned away. The streetlights cycled through the spectrum, hallucination bright. Their glare hid the trickle of blood mingling with the greasy rain.

Chapter One

When the call came, Valerie Endrada was in the bedroom pawing through a jumble of unpacked containers, looking for her daughter’s swimsuit. The mess frustrated her; lately, she had been feeling that her life was full of disorganized corners heaped with things she couldn’t find. Moving had only made it worse. When she heard Max talking to the dinery screen, it was a welcome distraction.

He had blanked it by the time she looked in. “Who is it?” she asked.

“For you,” he said. “It’s Joansie.”

That was Max’s nickname for his mother when she was on a rampage of good works. Activism ran in his family; at the moment, Max was wearing a Freedom of Information shirt, with a red headband around his forehead. He looked ready to defend the barricades.

“What’s she want?” Val said.

Max shrugged. “She’s not at home, she’s at the clinic.”

“Uh-oh,” Val said. It was Allday, and they had planned on a picnic with Max’s parents. Joan was supposed to be at home fixing food.

“Look, Mama,” Dierdre said cheerfully, plucking a red fruit from her breakfast bowl and holding it out.

“That looks good, Deedee,” Val said. She had never seen anything like it. It had a vaguely repulsive heart shape, with gaping pores on the surface. To Max she said, “What are you feeding her?”

“It’s called a strawberry,” Max said, holding out a container of them he was packing for the picnic. “One of those retrogenic things—backbred till it’s healthy again, you know.” Val took one and bit in cautiously. The inside was white and crunchy; the flavor was tart. She tossed the remainder into the compost. “You didn’t pay for them, did you?” she asked.

“Of course not. It was some sort of promotion.”

Val went into the studium to take the call.

Joan looked breathless and scattered, as usual. She always tried to keep her graying hair pulled back in a bun, but it was constantly getting loose. The blue lab coat she was wearing meant she was on duty. She had retired from practice five years ago, but still did volunteer work at a charity clinic in Djenga Shana.

“Valerie! Good,” she said, all business. “I didn’t know who else to call. I’ve got a very peculiar problem here.”

“Joan, why are you at the clinic? I thought we were having a picnic.”

“They called me in because they were short-staffed. And I’m calling you in now. I need your expertise.”

“Professional or personal?” Val asked.

“Professional. As an exoethnologist. I’ve got a crazy alien on my hands.”

That was not terribly surprising, considering that Djenga Shana attracted some of the most indigent recent arrivals from the Twenty Planets.

“Where’s your alien from?” Val asked.

“That’s the problem. I don’t know. The patient’s got no ID, and isn’t very coherent.” She lowered her voice. “It’s a suicide case. It’s been twenty years since I’ve seen one of those, our prevention programs are so good.”

“Why don’t you call a mentationist?” Val said.

“I will, as soon as I know how to describe this patient. Val, this isn’t a him or a her.”

“A himher?” Val said. That was an easy riddle to solve.

“No,” Joan said a little crossly. “I know a Gyne when I see one. This isn’t an androgyne. It isn’t anything. No sexual characteristics at all—like one of those prudish children’s dolls. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

Val hesitated a moment. It went against the grain to give away information she could get paid for; but Joansie was family, and it was in a good cause. At last she said, “I have, but you couldn’t have one in your clinic.”

“I do,” Joan maintained.

“No. What I mean is, there is only one documented case of true, natural asexuals—on Gammadis, the closed planet. No native has ever left it, and only about forty Capellans have ever seen it. What you have must be some sort of surgical construct, or a mutation.”

“I wish you would come here and look for yourself. I’ve got a hunch something strange is going on. You’ll know what I mean when you get here. If you can make it by 9.50, we’ll still have plenty of time to get to the beach.”

Val hit the time key to look up the university time. It was 8.90. A little over half an hour to get to the other side of the world. That was just like Joan. She swept people up in her crusades like a small, determined hurricane. “No peripheral vision,” Max sometimes said of her. But the fact was, Max had gone and married someone very like his mother.

“I can’t, Joan,” Val said, even though resistance was futile. “Max would kill me. I promised to be in charge of Deedee today. He’s had to do it all week.”

“Never mind that,” Joan said breezily. “I’ll call E.G. and tell him to give Max a hand.”

The last time Max’s father had baby-sat Dierdre, she had come home calling people she didn’t like “infomongers.” Max had been more amused than Val.

“I don’t know, Joan...” Val said.

“Don’t try to fool me, you want to come. I’ll be expecting you.” Joan cut the connection.

Val sat staring at the screen, which had reverted to clock mode. She clicked her thumbnail against her front tooth, a habit that made Max crazy. Actually, Joan had been right; Val was curious. She had gone into xenology dreaming of expeditions to new planets; but those days were long gone. No one could afford exploration any more. Magisters minor like herself might spend whole careers just going over dog-eared records from old expeditions, trying to extract from them one more monograph, never seeing any culture but Capella Two’s, never discovering anything new. Val was restless for distraction.

“What was it?” Max said when she came out. The dinery table was heaped with picnic food; Dierdre had disappeared into her room.

“Your mother wants me to come to the clinic for a while,” Val said. “She’s got an interesting case. We’ll have to meet you at the beach.”

“Does that mean I’m taking Deedee?” Max said, his voice ominously neutral. “Wait until The Boss hears.”

Deedee came racing in with a flexup toy in the shape of a fanciful alien. “Look what I’m taking, Mama,” she said. “Papa said I could.”

Val knelt to be at her level. “Listen, sweetie,” she said, “Mama’s got to go somewhere for a while. I’ll catch up with you later.”

“Do I have to go with Papa?” Deedee said, disappointed.

“Yes. Don’t eat all the sawberries before I get there.”

“Strawberries,” Max said.

“I always have to go with Papa,” Deedee protested. “You never want to take me.”

Val wondered if children were genetically programmed to pull their parents’ guilt-strings. She hesitated, and all was lost. Deedee brightened at the look on her face.

“Go dress, and maybe you can come,” Val said. There had never been a more useless “maybe.”

Joyously, Deedee raced off to her room. Max said, “To the clinic? Val, are you crazy? Have you ever been there?”

“She needs to be exposed to other ways of life,” Val rationalized valiantly.

Max looked beseechingly heavenward. “Well, don’t blame me if she comes home asking what ‘venereal disease’ means.”

Val kissed him on the cheek and went to the bedroom to find her pack and university scarf.

On the pumice path to the waystation, Val tried to ignore the bite of disappointment at their new, low-rent neighborhood. As Deedee ran ahead down the hill, Val looked out at the bone-gray moonscape, and told herself it wasn’t so bad. The subsidized copartment was perched high on the slope of a crater, and the enclave nestled below like some monster bird’s nest, a clutch of domed buildings, eggshell white. In the west the huge limb of Gomb spanned half the horizon, its colors bleached to pink by the rising sun. Everything seemed bright and clear-cut in the dry air—all but Val’s thoughts. They felt like a messy room, too small for all the piles of neglected problems.

In their student days, she and Max had shared a jaunty contempt for the power structure, because then they could afford it. Val had been succeeding then—honors graduate, scholarship to study under a magister prime—and it had not seemed far-fetched to aim at a career as an independent contractor in the knowledge business. But the years since graduation had brought only frustration. The market was flooded with young magisters, each hawking an obscure expertise. One by one, her friends were giving up and signing life contracts with the big infocompanies, yielding all their future copyrights and patents for secure employment. So far, she had resisted that irrevocable step, hoping she only needed to repackage her knowledge to make it a more appealing commodity.

“Presentation, that’s what I need to work on,” she would say to Max. He only rolled his eyes. He had supported her loyally, even though it meant staying home with Deedee because they couldn’t afford to send her to school. But Val’s enormous education debts were coming due. For a while last month their infoservice had gotten disconnected for nonpayment. Val had grown intensely guilty, knowing it was her fault, for putting independence before responsibility.

The waystation jutted up from among the egg-domes like a shard of broken glass on edge. When Val stopped at the navigator, she found that getting to Djenga Shana was complex; with a twinge of guilt she paid for a printout of the shortest route. The station was crowded with holiday travelers. Holding Deedee’s hand, she dodged noisy families in bathing suits and hiking gear, lined up at the ports to the vacation spots. Her own destination port was almost deserted.

Deedee wanted to go through the wayport first, so Val stood and watched as her daughter disappeared in the flash of a lightbeam, leaving only a wisp of steam. The sight always gave her a twinge of panic. Quickly, she paid her own fare, stepped in, felt the familiar tingle, then
stepped out of an identical port in a waystation a thousand miles away. Deedee was there, studying some dried gum on the tile floor. Val took her hand again, then looked around for the next port on their route.

Almost as soon as she stepped from the wayport at Djenga Shana, Val regretted bringing Deedee. She paused to rearrange the scarf that gave her academic immunity here, then took her daughter’s hand firmly. It was near noon, and the street was shuttered and empty. The garish signs looked faded and peeling, naked without the glamor of night and light. There was a pervasive smell of spilled beer cooking in the sun.

“Mama,” Deedee protested, “don’t hold my hand so tight.”

“I’m sorry, chick,” she said. She dreaded any questions.

Outside a fetish shop, a Worwha Shana gbinja stood, wrapped in the gray tubular garment he had donned at puberty and would not remove until he died. It was ragged and stained around the hem and sleeves, but the tough fiber looked like it would outlast the man. He glared at Val with loathing from under a mass of unshorn hair, doubtless wishing her to Worwha hell. There was a story in the xenology department at UIC about a researcher who had lived with the Worwha Shana for four years, and when he left, his Worwha family still called him “heathen garbage.”

When Val entered the clinic, two wan, barely dressed teenage girls were sleeping in the waiting room. Roused by her entrance, one of them eyed her suspiciously. Val knocked at the battered lexan reception window. The clinic was like an unarmed fort, constantly under siege by drug-seekers.

Joan herself came bustling out to open the locked door. Deedee cried out, “Gramma! We came to visit you.”

“Deedee!” Joan said, startled. Then, to Val, a whispered, “Why did you bring her here?”

“Temporary insanity,” Val said.

As they passed down the hall, Joan said, “Go on and help yourself to coffee. I’ll get Mandy to look after Deedee. Come with me, chickpea.”

When Joan returned alone, she poured a cup from the coffee urn and stood sipping it, leaning against the wall as if a little too tired to support her own weight. “It was a pretty standard clientele last night,” she said. “A couple of mugged tourists, the usual overdoses and nerve burns, some sexually transmitted diseases. Then about 1.50 Cannie Annie—one of our local characters—came staggering in saying there’d been a murder. You can’t trust what she says, so we didn’t call the law. I went out to check.”

“Joan! You promised us you wouldn’t go out of the clinic at night.”

“Well, I’m not going to let someone die,” Joan said crossly. “Besides, Bart was with me. Annie led us to an alley, and there we found our visitor from another planet, lying in a pool of blood, wearing a raincoat and nothing else. It had tried to blow its brains out with an explosive gun.”

“How horrible,” Val said softly.

“It hadn’t done a very good job. Not even close. We brought it back, patched it up, checked it over. That’s when we found it was an ‘it.’ I’ve been checking the medical nets, Val, and I can’t find a record of any mutation like this. There could be a surgical explanation—god knows we see some strange body alterations here—but if so they did it without leaving a trace. And why would anyone choose to eradicate their sex?”

“Maybe it wasn’t voluntary,” Val said. Here, she would believe anything. “Have you been able to ask the patient?”

“Well, that’s the problem. Medically, the patient’s not in bad shape, aside from being a little low on blood. But mentally—well, at first it was completely unresponsive, almost catatonic. I gave it a standard antidepressant, and it got quite agitated and incoherent. The drugs ought to be wearing off now; maybe we’ll have better luck. Let’s take a look first.”

She led the way into a small observation room. She closed the door, touched the switch, and the wall became a one-way window into the adjoining room.

The patient was crouched in a chair in hospital pajamas, knees drawn up to its chest. Val stared, fascinated. The person beyond the glass fit none of her half-formed expectations. She had pictured something eunuchlike and faintly repulsive, but the neuter’s face instead had an androgynous, Greek-sculpture beauty: classic bone structure, long lashes, dark brows under curly golden hair. But now the hair was darkened and matted, the eyes swollen. There was a bandage on the left temple, and the hair around it was singed.

“It used a gun?” she said softly. She was no mentationist, but to her the violence of the method meant something—a particular hatred of the self, a desire to inflict damage and pain. An attempt to match inner violence with outer, perhaps.

“Yes,” Joan said. “Good thing its aim was so poor. It could have done real damage to that beautiful face.”

Val said, “How old is...I feel strange saying ‘it.’”

“What else can you say? No other word is accurate. If this were one of us, I’d say it’s in its mid-twenties.”

“Really? That old?” The patient looked younger, but perhaps that was only because Val associated the lack of obvious sexual characteristics with adolescence. “What do you want me to do?”

“First, I’d like you to talk to it and get me some information. You know what a mentationist is going to want. He’ll take a scan and want to start altering the patient’s mental template. But how can we do that in good conscience when we don’t know what’s normal for this patient? We need to do a little research before jumping in.”

Val felt a little bubble of excitement rising through her chest. Whatever the thing in the next room was, it clearly represented an unstudied aspect of someone’s culture. This was an opportunity for discovery, maybe even a profitable one.

In the next room, the figure had moved; now it was pressing its knuckles to its forehead as if to hold in some terrible thought. Val felt a surge of sympathy and alarm invading her scientific detachment. She had never seen a suicidal person before, and the reality dispelled any romantic fantasies she might have had. There was nothing pretty about this. The person in the next room looked to be in almost unendurable pain.

“I’d feel better if there were a mentationist present,” she said. “What if I do something wrong?”

“I’ll be here, watching. Bart’s on standby. Don’t worry, Val. You’re a trained interviewer. What can you do wrong?”

She didn’t dare let Joan know how unprepared she felt.

“You don’t mind if we record the interview?” Joan said. “We may need to study it.”

Val restrained herself from asking about copyright. The recording was unlikely to be valuable.

Joan opened the door to usher Val into the corridor. She took out an access card and slid it into the slot. The door clicked open; Val took a long breath and stepped through.

As she entered, the patient rose quickly to face her, keeping the chair between them, as suspicious and edgy as a trapped animal. For a moment the two of them stood motionless, staring at each other. Val forced her voice into a friendly tone to say slowly, “Hello. My name is Valerie Endrada. You can call me Val.”

“Are you here to drug me?” the neuter asked. Its voice was somewhere between alto and tenor, and full of strain. But what struck Val was the incongruous accent: not just a plain Capellan accent, but the cultivated accent of the intellectual elite, the kind of people you called “magister.” She felt a moment of disorientation. Was she talking to someone found half-dead in a squalid alley, or to a colleague?

“No,” she said. “I’m not a mentationist.”

“Tell them I don’t want any more drugs,” the neuter said. “I can’t think when I’m drugged. I’ve got to be able to think.” One hand rose to its forehead, then flinched away when it touched the bandage. The evidence of what it had done seemed to repulse it.

Val heard her voice drop into the cadence she used with Deedee. “The drugs are only to make you feel better.”

“Why do they have to give me drugs at all?” the patient said in a low, agitated voice. “What use is it, forcing me to feel this way? Are they just trying different psychoactives to see how I’ll react? Is this an experiment?”

“They’re giving you drugs because you tried to kill yourself,” Val said.

For a moment it stared at her, as if shocked to hear the news. Then some thought or memory crossed its face and it looked upward, teeth clenched, drawing a ragged breath. Softly, almost to itself, it said, “Why does anyone care about that? What can it matter, one dead bland more or less? Wouldn’t it just be simpler to get rid of me?” It turned away then, and with its back to her wiped the tears from its eyes with its hands. After a moment, it looked back and saw Val’s dismayed expression; then another emotion swept across its face—guilt, this time. Quickly it said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. Please don’t listen. It’s the drugs, they make me babble. I barely know what I’m saying.”

“That’s all right, you can’t offend me,” Val said. She took a step closer, wishing she could do something. Watching this was agonizing. But the neuter only retreated, hidden behind the wall of paranoia again.

“Are you here to study me, then?” it said. “Are you a xenologist?”

Val hesitated, then decided lying was no way to gain a person’s trust. “Yes,” she said. “Now you know my name and who I am, and I don’t know the first thing about you.”

“You Capellans,” the alien said softly. “You’ve always got to know.”

“If we’re going to make you feel better, we have to know something about you.”

“Then you’re not writing your dissertation about me, or something like that?”

“No.”

As if barely daring to hope, it said, “You’re not recording this? There are no cameras, or anyone watching?”

Val felt her face giving her away. The alien’s expression showed betrayal. Desperately, Val said, “It’s not my choice. I’m not in charge. Please believe me, all we want is to help you.”

“Then why do you watch me like a peep show?” It was barely a whisper.

“Oh God, what a mess,” Val said, mostly to the watching wall. She was in fathoms over her head. “I’m sorry, this is all wrong. Please forgive me.” She turned to leave.

“No! Don’t leave me!” the neuter cried out. She turned in time to see the desperation on its face, quickly hidden. It began to pace, talking fast, its hands moving nervously, as if it didn’t know what to do with them. “I shouldn’t be bothered, really. I...I’m not naive, like I used to be. You know, once I had the opportunity to use Epco’s proprietary database, and I did a search for my own name. There were over two hundred articles written about me, all classified, Epco’s property. Two hundred! Even I don’t know enough about me to write that much. Every step I took, every word I said, was being studied, and had been since I got here. You know, it never even occurred to me why they took all those scans and samples every time I went to the clinic for some virus I had no immunity to. Can you believe that? I didn’t even know I was in a zoo. Please don’t think I resent it; I just need to get used to the way you Capellans are. It’s your nature. You don’t mean any harm.”

The nervous avalanche of words came to a halt. Val was very curious by now. She didn’t want to disturb the alien’s train of thought, so she said, “It would drive me crazy.”

“Well, you were raised with the expectation of privacy. I don’t have that excuse. The way I grew up, we were never alone. We saw everything about each other. There was no ethic of modesty; that is all a product of sexuality. If I were living back on Gammadis, I would be sleeping every night in a roundroom with dozens of other blands, all in a pile, like mice. I would have all that physical closeness, without any taint of sexuality—just plain humanity. I would fall asleep to the sound of their breath, the feel of their skin against mine. Do you realize, I’ve barely been able to touch another person in innocence for twelve years? On my planet, they believe that neuters need to be with their own kind, or they go crazy. Maybe it’s true.”

During this speech, Val had drawn a little closer. Now she stood, hands at her sides, and said very quietly, “Would you like me to give you a hug?”

A complex look crossed the alien’s face—part fear, part longing. “No,” it said, drawing back tensely. “Please don’t be offended. It’s not you.”

“What is it?” she said. She was so close she couldn’t help but notice again the alien’s striking beauty. In some ways, its vulnerability only heightened the effect. She wanted to hold it as she would Deedee, to lay its head on her shoulder and stroke its hair, to feel the panic subside.

“I’m sorry,” the alien said. “You’ve got to understand how hard it is for me, to live in a gendered world. I have to be so careful. Sexuality is always present, with you. It never leaves your minds. It’s as if you exist in a cloud of pheromones I can’t sense, but only guess at. I have to be on my guard all the time, thinking of hidden meanings, body language, and innuendoes. I can never assume I understand you, never take anything at face value. It all has to go through a gender-filter in my brain. I wish I could get away from it, just be able to relax, be in a completely nonsexual situation, just for a day. I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to, for the rest of my life....You don’t want to know all this. These drugs make me babble.”

Once more, Val had the disorienting feeling that she was talking to another magister, or at least to someone of formidable—though currently scrambled—intelligence. “I do want to know,” Val said. “But please tell me something first. You’re from Gammadis?”

“Yes. How did you know?” As soon as the words were out of its mouth, the neuter shook its head. “Of course you know. You only have to look at me to know.”

“I know because you said so,” Val said calmly. “It surprises me, because that planet has been off-limits to Capellans for sixty-three years.”

“I came here before that.”

Val smiled skeptically. “You don’t look that old.”

“It’s a fifty-one light-year trip.”

That, at least, rang true. Any lightbeam traveler would not have aged during the journey. “You must have been very young when you set out,” she said.

“I was seventeen.”

“What’s your name?”

The alien’s eyes fell to the ground, as if in shame. “Tedla Galele,” it said indistinctly.

“I’m glad to meet you, Tedla.” Val held out her hand. The alien’s arms were crossed protectively; it hesitated, then finally held out a hand. They shook formally. After touching her, Tedla turned away and walked numbly across the room till stopped by the wall, then stood leaning against it, cheek resting on the cool ceramoplast.

“Can you get me out of here?” it asked. “I hate this room. It’s driving me crazy.”

“Not unless you have somewhere to go. Do you have any family, or someone we could contact?”

Tedla stared at its feet. “No. I’m the only one.”

“Where have you been living?”

“Out there,” the neuter gestured vaguely. “The money’s all gone, you know.” A current of agitation welled up again, and it said, “I wasn’t supposed to have to protect myself, or make decisions, or compete with you. That was the promise. People were going to take care of me. Now I have to act human, but I can never be human. If only I could go back! If I were at home I would know exactly what was expected of me. I could live my life surrounded by others of my own kind. Here, I’m nothing...Oh god, why can’t I shut up?”

Its hands had begun to shake. It clasped them tightly together, making a visible effort to gain control.

On an impulse, Val reached out and took the neuter’s hands in hers. She half expected it to pull away, but instead it grasped her hands tightly. Its eyes were closed now. In a whisper, it said, “I feel like there is something I ought to be doing, only I don’t know what it is, and I probably wouldn’t be able to do it anyway. But if I don’t, something terrible is going to happen, but it’s hopeless, I can’t prevent it. It’s already happened, it’s who I am. There’s nothing I can do, absolutely nothing.”

“Shh,” Val said, stroking its hands. She could feel the tension in them, the stretched tendons and knotty bones. “It’s all right, Tedla. Everything is going to be all right.”

“There’s nothing out there for me, nothing,” Tedla said. “No home, no life that fits me. I’m a piece from a different puzzle. I don’t fit anywhere.”

“We’ll make a place for you,” Val said. “Don’t worry.”

Behind her, the door clicked open. Joan entered, carrying a transdermal.

“No,” Tedla whispered.

“Tedla doesn’t want any more drugs,” Val said.

“It’s just a sedative,” Joan said to Tedla, “to calm you down. That’s all, I promise.”

The neuter just looked at her in terror.

“Don’t you want to feel a little calmer, Tedla?” Val asked. “Come on, it’ll help you think.”

Slowly, Tedla held out its arm. With a quick, practiced motion Joan pressed the hypo against the vein. “Why don’t you sit down now?” she said in an encouraging, doctor-to-patient voice. She gave Val a significant look, and nodded toward the door.

“I’ll be back in a second, Tedla,” Val said, and followed Joan out.

In the hall, Joan turned to say, “Good work, Val. All we need now is to find someone looking for a missing Gammadian.”

For a brief moment, Val hoped there wasn’t anyone. She wanted this find all to herself. Her conscience immediately censored the thought. “Of course,” she said. “This shouldn’t be hard. There are probably ‘missing’ notices all over X-O Net.”

Joan’s office was a tiny cubbyhole cluttered with printouts and mementoes of former patients. Val had to restrain herself from wiping the dust from the screen as she sat down at the terminal.

After tapping into X-O Net, she ran a search for anything posted in the last five days with the key words “Tedla Galele,” then sat back to wait. When the terminal beeped, she was surprised to see it had turned up nothing.

“That’s odd,” she said.

“Expand the search,” Joan suggested.

She did, but with no better results.

“What about all those articles in the Epco files?” Joan said.

“If they’re proprietary, we’d need to pay a fortune. But some of them must have leaked out into public domain. I’ll check.” This time, the screen responded with two citations to articles on Gammadian physiology, both ten years old. “Well, at least now we know Tedla really exists,” Val said, and hit the key to access the first one. The screen responded, “Classified proprietary: Western Alliance Corporation. Please input access code.” Val tried Joan’s number, then her own, but both were rejected. She went back and tried the second article, with the same result.

“Did it say WAC?” Joan asked, looking over her shoulder.

“Yes. Not Epco. Maybe Tedla was confused about which infocompany.”

“Or maybe they both have buckets of classified information.”

Val clicked her thumbnail against her teeth, thinking. “Actually, WAC makes more sense than Epco,” she said. “I think the original expedition to Gammadis was sponsored by WAC. It would make sense if they were keeping tabs on Tedla.”

“Should we ask them?”

Val shook her head. “They don’t give out anything cheap. Let’s try the public-service sources first. Isn’t there some sort of missing persons list?” So Val embarked on a search. But as time passed, she came to dead end after dead end. No one of Tedla’s name or description had been reported missing. Tedla had no listed number or address anywhere on Capella Two. No one of that name had ever registered to vote, or owned taxable property. It had no professional license, no credit history, and no infonet account. They turned up a variety of other Galeles, including one with a criminal record and another who had been expelled from UIC, but no trace of Tedla.

“We’ve got an invisible person,” Val said.

“Or someone who’s been hidden,” Joan said suspiciously.

Val thought briefly of posting a Found notice, but decided it would violate Tedla’s privacy. The fact was, she wasn’t entirely disappointed by her failure: The longer it took to track down where the alien belonged, the longer she would have with it.

From down the hall, she heard Deedee’s voice raised in play. She checked the time, and groaned. “We were supposed to be at the beach half an hour ago.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll call E.G. and tell him we’re hung up. Keep working on it, Val. I can’t keep Tedla here much longer. Legally, I have to transfer every client home or to a curatory within twenty-five hours. I’d rather not put this patient at the mercy of the public health system. That’s hard enough to negotiate if you know how.”

Joan left the room, and Val sat thinking. There was something here that didn’t add up. The disastrous end to the Gammadian expedition had happened a dozen years ago. She had been in her teens, but still could remember the near-universal outrage when the explorers had returned from their fifty-one-year trek back, expelled by the rulers of Gammadis for their attempt to interfere in the local culture. Already then, Val had wanted to be an explorer herself. She hadn’t been able to imagine how they had squandered the opportunity, the only one in two centuries.

But she could not remember any whisper of a Gammadian having come back with them.

Abruptly, she got up and went back down the hall to Tedla’s room.

Tedla was crouched in the chair, the way Val had first seen it; but this time the Gammadian didn’t stir at her entrance, merely followed her with its eyes. She sat down facing it.

“Tedla, I need to know more about you,” she said.

The neuter looked away indifferently.

The sedative had clearly taken effect—too much effect, perhaps. Val itched to ask outright if Tedla were telling the truth about its name and origins, but something warned her an adversarial approach would only make things worse. She needed to establish an atmosphere of trust.

“All right, let me tell you a little bit about myself,” she said. Without much plan, she began to talk at random about the new copartment, and Max, and Deedee, and the picnic they were planning. When she next paused for breath, Tedla was watching her closely.

“You have a child?” it said.

“Yes, Dierdre, but we call her Deedee. She’s really a good kid, even though she can be a terrible pain.”

“I’ve never known a Capellan child,” Tedla said.

“Would you like to see her picture?”

“Yes.” At last, Val thought she saw a flicker of interest in the neuter’s face. She went over to the wall screen and accessed her home file, picking out her favorite picture—an impish Deedee looking over her shoulder at the camera. Tedla came to her side, gazing at it in fascination.

“She’s a little fiend,” Val said.

Tedla looked fixedly at her, obviously uncertain what to say, and somewhat troubled. Choosing its words carefully, it said, “You don’t like her, then?”

Val laughed. “Don’t be silly, Tedla. Of course I like her.”

“But...fiend means something horrible.”

“I just know her, Tedla. Children are nasty little brutes, you know. And we love them anyway.”

“I see,” Tedla said, as if it didn’t.

“You’ll understand if you ever...” She remembered too late that the person at her side could never have children, and finished, “...get to know any children well.”

Tedla appeared not to have noticed her slip; in fact, it was preoccupied with some hidden thought “You love them, even if they do perfectly horrible things? Even if they betray you and hurt you?”

The question was obviously more than theoretical. “Yes,” Val said seriously. She watched Tedla’s face, and saw the motion of memories across it. She was getting somewhere now.

“Would you like to meet her?” Val said.

“She’s here?”

“Yes. Just a second, let me go find her.”

When she poked her head out the door, Joan was coming down the hall looking for her. She said, “Joan, go call Deedee. I want Tedla to meet her.”

Joan didn’t move. “Do you think that’s wise?”

“Humor me. I’ve got a hunch,” Val said.

Deedee appeared from a doorway down the hall, saw Val, and came racing toward her, bubbling with news. Val said to Joan, “Make sure the recorder is running.” Then, to Deedee, “I want you to meet someone, Dee. Pretend to be good, okay?” Then she ushered her daughter into the mad alien’s room.

Deedee stood inside the door, staring at Tedla, who had retreated behind the chair and now stared back, both disconcerted and fascinated.

“This is Tedla, Deedee,” Val said. “Tedla comes from another planet—a planet so far away it takes fifty years to make the trip.”

Deedee didn’t react. She turned to Val and said, “Mama, did you know that people die here?

“No,” Val said, startled.

“Mandy showed me. They have a bin for stiffs.”

Good Lord, Val thought, what an introduction. She looked apologetically at Tedla. “I warned you.”

Deedee spied the bed, and dashed over to it. “Mama, did you know these beds move?” Before Val could react, she clambered up onto the formable bed and pressed one of the controls. Nothing happened. “Oops,” she said, performing now. She pressed another square, and the bed rose to mold itself around her body. She froze it, then scrambled up to look at the impression she had made. Both Val and Tedla moved forward instinctively to catch her as she came close to tumbling backward off the bed. “See?” she said.

“Yes, I see. Now put it back, Deedee. That’s Tedla’s bed.”

Deedee turned around and stared at Tedla again. “Do you know how to play Scratcher?”

“No,” Tedla said.

“What will you pay me if I teach you?”

“Not now, Deedee,” Val said to her budding infocapitalist. “Come sit down with us.”

Deedee allowed Val to lead her to a chair, and all three of them sat. The child was now looking at Tedla fixedly. She said suddenly, “Are you a man or a lady?”

Val was ready to jump in, but Tedla said, “Neither. On the planet I come from, there are three sexes, not just two.”

“The polite word is ‘asexual,’ Deedee,” Val said.

Val expected more questions, but Deedee was pondering the explanation. Val said awkwardly, “Tedla, which should we call you—‘he’ or ‘she’?”

“Actually, your word ‘it’ is closest to the pronoun we use on my planet,” Tedla said. “We even use the same word to refer to animals and inanimate objects, like you do.”

“I don’t know. ‘It’ seems slightly...derogatory.”

“Well then, that’s an accurate translation, too.”

Deedee said, “I live with both my mama and papa.” She had just been learning that not all children did.

“I never knew my mama or papa,” Tedla told her. “No one on my planet does, except the really poor people who live like savages.”

“Did you know your gramma?” Deedee asked.

“No. I was brought up in a creche with lots and lots of other children. We had docents and proctors and postulants instead of mamas and papas.”

Deedee’s nose wrinkled. “I would hate that.”

Tedla leaned forward, looking relaxed for the first time. “No, you wouldn’t. We had lots of fun. We didn’t sleep in beds; we had a roundroom. It’s a big, circular room with a domed ceiling. The floor is cushiony, and you can bounce really high on it. All the walls are soft, so no one can get hurt. No grown-ups ever came into our roundroom.”

“How high could you bounce?” Deedee said.

“Almost to the ceiling.”

Deedee stood up on the chair and held up her arms. “This high?”

“No, higher than that.”

Deedee bounced on the cushion. “This high?”

Val made her stop. “You’re not in a roundroom, Deedee. You’re in a grown-up place, and you have to act like a grown-up here.”

Deedee settled down discontentedly. Val took her hand and said, “Come on, I think it’s time for you to go see gramma again.”

When Val had taken Deedee out into the hall and returned, she found Tedla sitting with its head in its hands, as if in the grip of dejection.

“Tedla? Are you all right?” Val said, a little alarmed.

Tedla looked up at her. Its face was not desperate, as before, but achingly sad. “It’s all coming back to me. Things I haven’t thought about in years. Seeing her reminds me of what it was like.”

Val sat down facing Tedla. “Are they good memories, or bad?”

“They are all intertwined, good and bad.”

“Tell me,” Val said softly. “Tell me everything.”

Tedla looked down at its hands. Val glanced over at the terminal to make sure it was recording. The red light blinked yes. Then, very softly, the alien began to speak.

Chapter Two

When I think of home, I see myself as a child, fitting my toes in the bark-crevices of a knotty old aiken tree, trying to climb high enough to look out over the autumn-colored river valley where I grew up. There was a spot on the third tier of branches where I could rest, legs dangling, and see all the broad floodplain, densely wooded with deciduous trees, a calico of gold and umber. The river seemed impossibly far away, a sinuous streak down in the bottomland, sometimes hidden with mist, sometimes shining like metal, sometimes chocolate-colored with mud. On still days I could hear the boat-horns echoing across the valley in the moist air.

Gammadis is a very beautiful planet. Everything there seems old. The plants, the insects, all fit. Here on Capella Two, the terraforming seems thin and ill at ease. The trees look like house plants, or museum pieces—on display, aware of their uniqueness. There, you pick up a handful of soil and it smells of eons of germlife permeating the planet. The river valley looks as if it formed of its own accord, not like an invention with vegetation veneered over it. There were even fossils in the limestone cliffs.

We don’t call it Gammadis, as you do—we call it Taramond. Once, when I stupidly corrected Magister Galele on this, he laughed and said, “Yes, and my homeworld is called Earth. The natives of Baker’s Knot call their home Eden.” Only later did I learn what he meant—that every planet is named after the origin world of mankind. As a child, I didn’t even know there was such a place. Or I thought my homeworld was it.

I still dream about that river valley where my creche was. But in my dreams the valley has changed. Some transformation has come over it—the water has risen and flooded the valley rim to rim, and it is full of mysterious islands—or all the land is built on, full of drab composite houses like Capella Two. I don’t like those dreams. I don’t want the valley to change. But there is nothing I can do about it, because it’s me that has changed, and all I hold in memory has changed with me. Not even in myself does that place exist any more, because the person I was then doesn’t exist, and that child was part of the place, as surely as the whiskered mudfish in the river. That child is gone forever.

The creche where I grew up was, of course, underground. The Capellan investigators who came to my planet kept asking why all the civilized societies lived underground, and all we could say was that it is the natural way for people to live. I could not imagine anyone but the poorest vagrant or the bravest frontier sappers living on the surface. When I came here, it took years before I felt easy sleeping in your flimsy houses perched right on the surface. I kept having an irrational feeling that somehow gravity would fail and we would all be flung off into space.

The creche had eight levels, one for every stage of a child’s life. We started out as infants on the lowest level, the nursery. When we learned to walk we graduated to the next level, and kept moving up at every developmental phase thereafter. On the highest level lived the protos preparing for matriculation. They were on the threshold of humanity. We feared and envied them at the same time. They seemed more alien than the adults, because they were at the nexus of transformation.

The rooms were all round, like bubbles, which in fact they were: Our buildings are not so much constructed as inflated, like bottles, from lignis, which hardens into a lovely, warm substance like wood, only stronger. Some bubbles were large, like the refectory where we all ate in shifts, or the assembly hall on level three. The rest were classrooms, recreatories, hygiene stations, labs, and offices for the gestagogues. Each level was laid out in a circle, ranged around a central axis. At the center was the roundroom for that level. At night the proctors would turn us all loose in our roundroom, the place that was ours alone. We would come pouring in, bouncing as high as we could on the cushiony floor, pushing each other into the soft walls. The only furnishings were pillows, and we had some mighty pillow wars before we would fall asleep, naked bodies all tangled together in the middle of the floor. The roundroom was the center of childhood. It was where we traded secrets, learned songs and stories, and sometimes fought out our rivalries safe from adult intervention.

I say there were eight levels, but in fact there were several below the ones we lived in. Those were grayspace: the territory of the blands. We knew nothing about it. Our food appeared from those levels, as did our linen and all the equipment used to clean our classes and playrooms; but we gave it no more thought than the electrical wiring. I learned later that there was an entire parallel building we never saw, made up of service corridors meant to keep the neuter staff invisible and out of mind. In a creche, that was futile.

The docents and proctors were all human, but as infants we were largely raised by neuters. I can see this surprises you, but it seemed quite natural to us. Blands were perfect for the tedious chores of infant care—nighttime feedings, diaper changes, the constant vigilance against harm. Both parties throve on it. As babies we quieted to a neuter’s touch as we never would to a human’s, and as toddlers we loved them for their patience and dumb devotion. Then we grew older and learned to despise them for the same reasons.

We have no families on Gammadis, as you do: at least, not ones based on biological relationships. Capellans tend to assume this means that our children lead loveless lives. It isn’t true. On the contrary, we cherish our children as if they were human.

***

“Just a second,” Val interrupted. She had been trying to keep quiet, despite several hundred questions in her mind, but this was too much. “Could you explain? Your children aren’t human?”

“No,” Tedla said. “We are biologically different from you. Our children are not miniature adults, as yours are. They are born sexually undifferentiated. Our bodies don’t change until puberty, when sexual characteristics appear. Until then, there is no way of knowing whether a child will become male or female—or whether it will be one of the minority who never mature, and remain in a childlike, asexual state forever.”

“So children are neuters?” Val asked.

Tedla seemed shocked. “No, certainly not. They are proto-humans. They may look like neuters, but they have the potential for humanity.”

“I see. You have to forgive my stupidity, Tedla. I don’t know much about Gammadis.”

Tedla looked at her uneasily. “This probably offends your Cappellan sensibilities. To you, children are already human. On Gammadis, we think of the years before puberty as an extended gestation period. That’s why learned people will call a creche a ‘gestatory.’ The fetal body and mind take that long to mature.”

“Unless they never do.”

“That’s right.”

When Tedla resumed the story, it seemed thoughtful.

***

Often I have searched my memories for any clue, any warning, of what I was going to become. I don’t know at what point my fate was decided. Perhaps it was at conception, or with some roll of random adrenal dice at puberty. Or—and this is what it’s hard not to dwell on—was it something I did? If only I could spot it.

I don’t know how I got my nickname, Tedla. Often it was obvious how a child got its nickname, like Moptop or Fidget, because it described the child’s looks or temperament. Other times, names are just nonsense words, or some whim of an adult. They don’t mean much, as a rule. They are only placeholders, a little better than “You There.” We all looked forward to receiving our real names at puberty.

I was a perfectly average child—neither very clever nor remarkably stupid, not especially talented athletically or artistically, but always able to hold my own. The only thing that made me stand out was looks—I was a pretty child. Though the gestagogues tried hard not to have favorites, I got more affection from the adults than the less attractive protos—it was only natural. Good looks counted for less among my peers. I wasn’t a natural leader like the brighter and more talented protos, but at least I was never rejected or excluded. When we would form up teams for games, I would be chosen in the very middle.

Virtually none of our learning was competitive, not even the sports. We were never ranked against each other. Often we had to complete assignments in groups, and we were evaluated for cooperation as well as achievement. As a result, I truly have no notion where I stood in my class, as Capellan children do. But I expect I was right in the middle.

Our classes were the usual academic ones—reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, and so on—but we also had sociability training and morality classes, since we had no families to teach us those things. Every day we had meditation to nourish the infant souls growing inside us, and on the seventh day we visited the chapel. The chapel was the only part of the creche that was above ground, and it resembled an indoor garden—glass roof open to the sky, contemplative paths to stroll on, little groves and grottoes where you could sit, with gates to close if you wanted to be private. We never used it, as some sects do, for communal worship. At our creche, religion was a solitary matter, something between a person and his or her own god.

My earliest memories are of the second level. We played in a soft, bubble-shaped room with bright lighting and marvelous, though well-worn, toys: chutes and clamber-frames and ball pools. Many of the toys took more than one to operate, so that we were forced to cooperate with other children, or else enlist one of the blands to help us. I can still see the soft, vein-roped hands of the neuters that used to watch over the playroom. There was one in particular, named Joby, who never tired of playing games, no matter how repetitive or banal. Everyone in the creche thought of Joby as childlike itself, as if its brain had regressed to an infantile state. Later, I learned that all blands have their particular tactics for survival—protective coloration that helps them blend into the background. Joby’s sweet, childlike nature was what protected it from harm. The adults taught us to speak to Joby, and others like it, in a firm and gentle tone, slowly, and to use simple words.

One of my most vivid early memories concerns Joby. It happened in the winter of my seventh year. The weather was very severe that year. Drifts of snow nearly buried the chapel and all the familiar landscape around the creche. When we went up for worship, the dome above was covered by a gray layer of snow, and in the odd twilight we could hear the wind pushing against it, trying to get in. Down in the creche, of course, we were quite safe and cozy, a self-sufficient little community, even though cut off from the rest of the world.

We protos were caught up in the preparations for Leastday, our main festival for that time of year. We were decorating the assembly hall for the climactic event of the season, the lighting of the Summer Candle. The candle tree was set up and strung with paper flowers. Fluffweed wreaths and treeshell garlands adorned the hallways. Everything was fragrant with the smell of glue, candle wax, and butterberry cakes cooking in the kitchens down below. Even though the cakes were meant for the celebration, a postulant would sometimes bring one up warm from the oven, and we would crowd around to get a piece, the adults admonishing us to share. On the day before the candle ceremony, the younger proctors got together and made an expedition out into the blizzard to gather evergreen boughs. We thought they were heroes. We hung up the boughs, getting our hands sticky with sap, and then the air was full of the tang of needletrees.

I had spent the day in Crafts, working on my wreath, and by evening my neck was stiff from bending over. When I woke the next morning, I could barely move my head, and I felt lethargic and nauseous. One of the postulants noticed me moping around in the dressing room after all the other excited children had lined up for refectory, and she got me to confess what was wrong. After feeling my temperature, she quickly hurried me off to the clinic.

Ordinarily, being in clinic was no hardship, since you got to miss classes and sleep in a bed of your own, like an adult. But that day there were no classes, and I felt mightily abused to be incarcerated, missing all the fun. But as the day progressed, I began to vomit and developed a headache that felt as if my brain were in a vise. No matter which way I lay, I couldn’t get comfortable.

The next morning I realized how worried they were when the Matron came down to see me. She asked me some questions, felt my forehead, then went into the next room to talk to the clinician. At last she came back to my bedside and said, “Tedla, we are calling an aircar to take you to the curatory at Tapis Convergence, so you can get better fast. You’ll have to get dressed now. Once you’re there, they will take good care of you.”

Now I am certain they suspected meningitis, which must strike fear into every gestagogue. The way we children lived gave free rein to any contagion we couldn’t be vaccinated against. Fortunately, those were few.

One of the proctors helped me dress in coveralls and coat, then led me up to the top floor. It seemed cold and deserted. In the corridor leading to the entryway, we found Joby waiting, dressed in a coat. It looked terribly anxious. The proctor gave my hand to Joby and said, “Wait in the cloakroom till the aircar arrives. Stay with Joby, Tedla.”

As if I were likely to run off. We waited a long time. I lay down on one of the benches, my head pillowed on Joby’s lap. The neuter stroked my hair. I had drifted off into an uneasy doze when at last the proctor came in and told us the aircar was here. “They had some trouble getting through,” he said. Out in the corridor, blands were carrying in some boxes of medicine, supervised by the clinician. They were tracking wet snow onto the floor, and I felt a groggy surprise that no one was scolding them. When the clinician saw me she squeezed my hand and said, “You’ll be all right as soon as you get there.”

“Are you coming with me?” I asked.

“No, Joby will go with you in the aircar. Someone will meet you when you get to the curatory.”

Outside, the world seemed wild and alien. Every familiar thing was buried under a layer of snow almost as tall as I was. The sky was gray and forbidding; the wind slung a stinging handful of snow into my face as I tried to look around. The blands had cut a path through the drifts to the playfield, where the aircar had landed at an odd angle, its legs sunk deep into snow. Even in the path the snow was deep, and it was exhausting work plowing through it. When Joby saw I was having trouble, it turned and picked me up. I was astonished at the bland’s strength; it looked so puny. I laid my head on its shoulder, my arms around its neck, and let it toil through the snow for me.

The pilot—a gruff, bearded man who looked displeased to be out in such weather—lifted me up into one of the two passenger seats and told me how to belt myself in. I looked out the open door to where Joby was still standing in the snow, looking into the aircar. It looked terrified. I said, “Don’t be scared, Joby. You’ll be all right.”

Impatiently, the pilot said, “Get in if you’re going to.”

Visibly steeling itself, Joby clambered up into the seat beside me, and the pilot slammed the door. I showed Joby how to work the buckles. The engine started with a deafening roar, and Joby clutched my hand. I felt the panic in its body, so I squeezed its hand and leaned against its shoulder.

We rose into the air with a sickening swoop, then banked. Joby’s eyes were closed tight. I don’t know why I felt so little fear—trust of the adults, perhaps. Or perhaps it was Joby acting like a bland that made me feel the obligation to act more human. At any rate, I stared out the window, trying to keep track of the horizon. Soon we rose into clouds, and there was nothing to see but grayness. Still the turbulent wind buffeted us; the ride was rough as a groundcar on a bad road. Joby and I were flung to either side, or nearly lifted out of our seats when the car dropped into a pocket of air. The pilot was talking to someone on his headset. He said nothing to us.

At last I felt the stomach-numbing sense of falling as we began a steep descent. At the very last moment we broke out of the clouds, and I saw a lighted landing pad below us. The snow was not so deep here, or the wind had swept it away. We settled down with a last bump. Without even stopping the engines, the pilot shoved open the door. Eager to be out, Joby unfastened its straps and clambered down, turning to lift me to the pavement. Then it looked around, trying to figure out what to do. “Where do we go?” it asked the pilot. He pointed and said, “Entry’s over there. Clear out, I’ve got another run.”

Joby took my hand and started off across the pad. Behind us the aircar door slammed shut and the engines began to roar. We headed down a ramp that led underground. When we passed through the door into a clean, tubular hallway, the silence was stunning.

No one was there to meet us. We stood looking around, bewildered.

“Maybe we should wait,” I said.

But there was no place to sit, so Joby steeled itself and chose a direction to go. Presently we came to a more frequented area. People in curatorial tabards were going about their business. Though several times Joby stopped to ask a question, people kept passing us as though we were invisible, and Joby was too timid to stop them.

At last we came to a circular lounge area with a counter in the middle, where a woman sat. Joby went up to her. She ignored us at first, but Joby stood there patiently, and at last she looked up. “What do you want?”

“Someone was supposed to meet us,” Joby said in a faint voice.

“What do you mean?” she said.

Anxiously, Joby said, “We came from the creche. Tedla’s sick. Someone’s supposed to tell us what to do.”

“What creche?” she said.

Joby and I looked at each other. It had never occurred to me that of course there was more than one, and ours must have a name. At last Joby, thinking feverishly, said, “Cliffside.”

The woman looked at me. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s sick,” Joby said.

“I gathered that,” she said drily. Before Joby could summon the courage to say more, she said, “Never mind,” and punched a number on her terminal. When someone answered, she said, “I’ve got a proto out here from Cliffside Creche. Do you have any record about this?” She listened for a while, then turned back to us. “Sit down over there.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Joby said, grateful to be told what to do at last.

We settled down to wait on a couch. The excitement of the ride had given me an adrenaline-powered energy that now began to take its toll. I felt uncomfortably hot, and taking my coat off didn’t help much. My headache was radiating down my neck, and making me feel sick again, though I had eaten nothing for over a day. I slumped against Joby, and it put an arm around me.

The lounge was very busy; people were constantly coming in, talking to the woman at the desk, sitting down to wait, and being directed into the many halls that radiated out from the hub where we were. Everyone but us seemed to know where they were and what they were doing. I watched them with a growing conviction that we were in the wrong place. We were lost, and no one cared. At last I couldn’t sit up any longer, and so I lay down, my head on Joby’s lap. It rubbed my back comfortingly. Joby was the only familiar, trustworthy thing in this place; I felt safe as long as it was near, though I knew it was as frightened as I.

After a long time Joby started to get up, and I clutched at it. “Don’t go away,” I said.

“I’m just going to talk to the lady. I’ll be right back,” it said.

From the couch I watched another fruitless exchange. Joby turned back to join me, its shoulders slumped in dejection. We didn’t say anything to each other, but I hugged it, and it kissed my cheek. “They’ll do something soon,” Joby promised.

Of course, they didn’t. As I drifted in and out of a feverish doze, I noticed that the woman at the desk had changed, and soon Joby had to go over and explain the whole situation again, from the beginning. After that I lost track of time. My mouth was parched, but I didn’t even have the energy to ask Joby to fetch me some water. It hurt to move, it hurt even to open my eyes.

I was roused from my torpor by the sound of shouting. The scene I saw then was surreal as a hallucination. Joby was standing at the counter, its face red with anger, its voice raised, the woman looking at it in utter astonishment. “Hours—hours!—that child has been lying there sick, with you ignoring it,” Joby shouted passionately. “What are you going to do, wait for it to die before you pay attention?”

The whole room fell silent, shocked to inaction by the sight of a bland stressed beyond its limit, shouting—actually shouting—at a person. Never in my life had I seen such a thing, and even in my condition I felt a pang of fear for Joby. Recovering from her paralysis, the woman at the counter stabbed at her console and said, “Could you send a curator down here immediately?”

“Joby!” I cried out, afraid they would clap it in chains and haul it away, and I would be left all alone. At the sound of my voice, Joby whirled around and came flying back to me. There were tears in its eyes. “Hush, Tedla, it’s all right, it’s all right,” it said, still so distraught its hands shook.

Seconds later, it seemed, a sweet-smelling, gray-haired woman in a curator’s tabard was leaning over me, asking questions that Joby stumbled to answer between its tears. Soon a rolling cot arrived, and they lifted me onto it. I wouldn’t let go of Joby’s hand, though the postulants tried to make me. The curator said, “Let the bland go, too.”

Joby stayed by my side through the tests that followed. It stayed when they transferred me to a bed. All through the restless, painful night that followed, every time I woke up, there Joby was, sometimes slumped over asleep but always in sight.

I was very sick for three or four days. When I was finally well enough to sit up and eat something, the curator looked very pleased. “I think you’re going to be all right, Tedla,” she said warmly, then added, “now maybe your bland can get some rest.”

I was trying to sort out my memories, so I asked uncertainly, “Why didn’t anyone meet us?”

“The pilot delivered you to the wrong curatory.”

“Did Joby really make a scene?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, laughing, then bent close to whisper, “your bland loves you very much.”

When she was gone, I looked over at Joby, who was standing there like the picture of exhaustion. “I love you too, Joby,” I said shyly.

It came over to my bedside and took my hand. “Hush, don’t say things like that,” it said, its eyes downcast.

“Why not?” I said. “It’s true.”

It put a finger on my lips to silence me. “You’re meant for better things than I,” it said.

I didn’t understand then what that had to do with love, but I do now.

***

For a while after coming back, I enjoyed some romantic notoriety at the creche as The Proto That Almost Died. I did not enjoy it. Once my physical stamina started to return, I slid gratefully into anonymity again.

The most lasting result of the episode was my relationship with Joby. Whenever we met in the hallway, Joby’s face would break out in a sunny smile, and I would rush into its arms. It would twirl me around till my feet left the floor. I sneaked it treats from refectory, thinking the blands didn’t get treats—though of course they finished up whatever food we didn’t eat. This went on for several years, till the older protos started whispering, “Neuter-lover!” when I passed, and I learned not to be so open about my affections.

We kept a great many traditions and holidays in the creche—more than they do in the outside world. I suppose it was to give us a sense of cultural identity. My favorite holiday was Tumbleturn Day, which came in the spring at a time when the snow was still melting in slushy heaps and the ground was too wet to play on, but spring fever had set in, making us seriously restless. We planned for weeks in advance what we were going to be on Tumbleturn Day, but kept it a secret from all but our truly special friends, so everyone would be surprised—or at least pretend to be.

We always woke early and excited that morning, because it was the one day of the year when confusion reigned, and all roles were reversed. We rushed from the roundroom to our lockers, where we had secreted costumes or insignia to show what we were supposed to be. There were always huge arguments about whether it was better to be a patternist or factor. I generally chose the former.

“Patternists are sly and sneaky,” said Bigger, a chunky proto who would have been the bully of our roundroom if anyone had let it get away with such antisocial behavior.

“Well, factors are dumb and greedy,” I retorted.

Those were the stereotypes, at any rate. Of course, we all lived up to the stereotypes when we played at being adults. It never occurred to us that our own gestagogues were patternists, since we trusted them implicitly.

In the year I am thinking of, my good friend Litch and I had conspired together to be vestigators, since we could torment the docents by asking them questions. Litch was a small, remarkably ugly proto with protruding teeth and a face that looked like someone had taken it by the ears and pulled out to either side. Litch compensated with comedy. We made such a peculiar-looking pair—me like an angel, Litch like a demon—that people tended to break out laughing just seeing us. Litch had wanted to spend Tumbleturn Day as a beet, since that would really be a turnaround; but I balked at being a vegetable.

Our vestigator costumes consisted of long lab coats filched from the dietician and hygienist, notepads, and huge cardboard spectacles. The sleeves of my coat came down several inches over my hands and I kept tripping on the hem, but this only made everyone laugh harder, so I didn’t mind.

When we got to refectory, the adults were all eating there as if they were us, dressed not in their gestatorial uniforms but in the bright, color-coded coveralls we always wore, but inside-out and backwards. One middle-aged proctor whom we had never suspected of humor was dressed as an infant in a sleeper, with the diapers on the outside. We shrieked in laughter to see him. The food line was reversed—we had to go through it backwards—and the blands served our food on upside-down plates. Eating got messy, but we knew the blands wouldn’t mind cleaning up.

There was a pretense of classes, but of course we all held our books upside down and wrote the words backwards. The docents pretended that this was all perfectly normal, and acted puzzled if anyone said anything the right way. Halfway through the morning, Litch and I set off to do research, as vestigators are supposed to. We had a list of nonsense questions we tried to ask everyone.

There was an older proto named Seldom who was also dressed as a vestigator that day. We didn’t know Seldom very well; it hung out with a creative, nonconformist group of protos who had actually written and presented a play the year before. Just before lunch it saw us in the hallway and said, “Do you protes want to discover something really strange?”

Flattered by its attention, we nodded. Seldom’s voice got low and mysterious then. “I know where there’s something hidden from ancient times. If you want to see it, you’re going to have to go on an expedition.”

“Okay,” Litch said.

“Come on, let’s get some supplies,” Seldom said, and headed for the refectory.

The blands were instructed never to hand out food except at mealtimes, but everything was so topsy-turvy that day that we managed to wheedle snacks out of them. “Ready?” Seldom said, viewing us critically. It had a pointer from one of the classrooms that it used as a walking stick.

“Lead on, Chief,” Litch said saucily.

We headed down the stairs. On the lower levels things were functioning more normally, since the truly little children didn’t know enough about what was normal to appreciate Tumbleturn Day. We passed the toddlers’ playroom, running crouched over so the blands wouldn’t see us through the window. Then we descended to the infants’ level. I hadn’t been there in years, and it looked small and low-ceilinged. Through an open door we glimpsed the nursery where the babies’ cribs stood, ranged in circles. All but the tiniest babies were off in their exercise room; only a lone bland tended the nursery, slowly gathering laundry.

Seldom stopped by one of the plain gray doors that only blands used, and turned to us. It whispered, “We’ve got to go through grayspace to get there. Are you ready?”

No one had ever ordered us not to pass through the graydoors. We had learned to avoid them purely through the adults’ unspoken example. I was not particularly frightened, but I was repulsed and uneasy. Seldom was watching us appraisingly, so I tried not to show it.

When we passed through the door, the contrast left us in no doubt where we were. Here, the walls were not warm lignis but rough, colorless poured-stone. Bare light fixtures hung from the ceiling, and all around us the pipes and ducts were exposed. It was like seeing the guts of an organism—the parts that make everything run, but no one was meant to know about.

We stood at the top of a metal staircase with open mesh treads. As we descended, our steps echoed loudly against the bare walls, and Seldom warned us to be more quiet. At the bottom, we found ourselves in a long, curving corridor that ran around the circumference of the creche. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years. From a doorway ahead, a loud mechanical humming came. I was relieved when Seldom gestured us away from it. “That’s the laundry,” it whispered. “The kitchen’s on the other side. That’s why you have to do this at mealtimes. All the blands are busy preparing the meal.”

“What happens if someone finds us down here?” I asked uneasily.

“Oh, the blands go crazy,” Seldom said.

“Really?” Litch said, perking up. “Let’s go scare them.”

“Not now,” Seldom said. “We’ve got more important things to do.”

At that moment we heard the sound of a cart approaching down the hall, its wheels rumbling on the cracked floor. Seldom set off running away from it, and we followed. Our leader skidded to a halt by another graydoor, and we all dived through. We found ourselves at the head of another staircase leading down into an even dimmer level.

The walls in this level were old square blocks of poured stone with crumbling mortar. There was a dank, musty smell. “This is where the neuters’ roundroom is,” Seldom said. “You want to see it?”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” Litch said.

We sneaked down the corridor to an open door. Inside was a locker room, but not like ours. Where ours was bright and clean, this one was dim and dingy. The old metal lockers were scratched and worn. Beyond this room was a shower room, but instead of shiny ceramic tile there was a poured-stone floor and walls stained with rust and hard water deposits. One of the showerheads dripped loudly as we tiptoed through. We stuck our heads through the next doorway. The blands’ roundroom was threadbare and dim. There were rips in the cloth covering the walls.

“Look at the neuter-sweat,” Litch said with distaste. The center of the floor, where they slept, was stained with the mark of decades of bodies resting there. “This is disgusting,” Litch said, holding its nose.

We escaped gratefully out into the hall again. Now Seldom led us to another door. This one had been padlocked, but the screws on the hasp had worked loose, so that it only looked secure. Before opening the door, Seldom looked at us and said, “Are you really brave?”

We nodded our heads.

“You’ve got to go the next part of the way in the dark. Okay?”

Litch and I exchanged a look, but we both nodded. Seldom opened the door and we slipped through. When the older proto came in and closed the door behind it, the darkness was absolute.

“Put your hands on the railing and feel your way down the steps,” Seldom whispered. “The light switch is at the bottom.”

I groped and found Litch’s hand in the dark. Hanging onto each other, we edged our way down the steps. At last my feet touched stone instead of metal, and I said, “Seldom?” For a panicky moment I wondered if the older proto had lured us here in order to escape and leave us in the dark. But I heard Seldom right behind me, feeling for the light switch. At last there was a click, and a sickly yellow light came on—a dusty bulb hanging from a cord. It would have seemed very dim, had our eyes not adjusted to the darkness.

On this level, the walls were not even poured-stone—they were raw limestone, cut from the bedrock itself. Curving away on either side was another corridor heaped with old junk. There were rusty garden tools and filing cabinets, broken furniture, and old machines. Litch and I ventured timidly out into the narrow walkway in the center, feeling dwarfed by the heaps on either side. I stopped to stare at a rusty machine of cast iron with a massive gear on one side. “How old is this stuff?” I said.

“This is the oldest level of the creche,” Seldom said. “It was built back in the Machine Age.”

We had all learned of the Machine Age, when people had built so many machines, and controlled them so poorly, that they had nearly destroyed life on Taramond. In those days, people had no respect for life or love for their world. To feed the machines’ voracious appetites for power, they had poisoned the air and water, altered the climate, leveled the forests, and squandered the soil. In the end, millions had died, and whole species had gone extinct. An aura of evil hung over these machines. They had been used for diabolical purposes. “Is the creche that old?” I asked.

“It wasn’t a creche then,” Seldom said.

“I bet it was a rocket factory,” Litch said. “I bet they built spaceships here.” The Machine Age was also when we last had contact with the stars, before what Capellans call the Dire Years.

Seeing how I recoiled from the machines, Seldom said, “Don’t worry, these machines couldn’t do much harm. They’re too little.”

The one with the gears was taller than I.

Seldom led us down the hall. It was lit by occasional bulbs, and in between them the shadows gathered. My back was crawling, and I kept looking behind us. Only dust was there.

At last Seldom turned down a passage that led inward like the spoke of a wheel. This hall was lined with cobwebby machines in gray metal casings, full of faded dials calibrated in characters I didn’t even recognize. I felt a thousand miles—or a thousand years—away from the creche. Here, everything was alien.

The hall ended in a rough stone archway opening into darkness. A breeze blew in from it, smelling of wet rock. On one wall was a metal box, which Seldom opened. It was full of switches. “Ready?” it said, looking at us. Without waiting for a reply, it pushed one of the switches. There was a faraway clunk, and the lights beyond the doorway came on, faltered, then came on again.

We edged through. Beyond the door lay a domed cavern carved from the rock. We found ourselves on a balcony that ran around the perimeter, edged with a metal railing. In the center of the space, squatting there like an immense, poisonous toad, was a single machine the size of a house. It was rounded on top, and had a forest of pipes feeding into it.

“This is the kind of machine that poisoned the world,” Seldom said in a whisper.

It radiated evil. I backed away, terrified that we would waken it, and it would start up again. “What’s it doing here?” I said. “Why didn’t they destroy it?”

“I don’t know,” said Seldom.

“I want to go back,” I said.

Litch was braver than I. It crept forward to the railing. “Look,” it said with a horrified fascination. “There are ladders to get down.”

“Of course,” Seldom said. “People had to tend the machine.”

I imagined a crew enslaved to the machine, working in chains. In my mind, they were blands. I couldn’t imagine people doing it.

“See over there?” Seldom pointed to another opening in the wall opposite the one where we stood. It was pitchy black. “You know where that leads?”

I didn’t want to know, but Litch said, “Where?”

“There’s a whole ’nother creche that was abandoned and walled up,” Seldom said. “That’s the only way into it now. And you know what? The bodies of the protos who were in that creche are still there. They’re just skeletons now.”

“Let’s go back,” I pleaded. At last Litch seemed to agree with me. It backed away from the railing. This place was too evil to be in.

We went back into the spoke-corridor and waited while Seldom opened the box to turn off the lights. It hesitated over the rows of switches. “Maybe I should punch a few others, just to see what they’ll do,” it said.

“No!” I pleaded, terrified.

Seldom relented and shut off the lights. We hurried back down the hallway to the bottom of the stairs. “Ready?” Seldom said, poised to switch off the lights.

I turned to race up the steps while the lights were still on. I only got about three steps up when Seldom threw the switch. Hanging onto the railing, I made it all the way up, and felt for the door. Suddenly, Seldom was there, blocking the way.

“Listen,” it said. “You two have got to swear not to tell anyone you were down here, or what you saw. Not another proto, not a grown-up, not even a bland. If I find you’ve told anyone, I’ll bring you down here and lock you up till you’re just another skeleton. Do you swear?”

“I swear,” we both said.

Seldom let us out then. We managed to sneak back up without anyone seeing.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept thinking how, directly below our roundroom, that machine lay in the dark, waiting for someone to start it going again. I kept waking up, heart pounding, thinking I heard it going, feeling imaginary tremors in the floor and a deep-buried growling that would signal the return of an ancient evil. As I would begin to drift off to sleep, I would think how, just above the machine, the blands were sleeping in that dirty roundroom, huddled together naked as we were. Everything horrible seemed like a mirror image of everything good. Nothing was secure any more.

It was a month later that the aliens came out of the sky.

***

On Gammadis, we joke about how everyone remembers exactly what they were doing when the aliens landed. I am no exception. I was in Language Arts class with my favorite teacher, Docent Mercady. She was young and pretty and gentle, and I worshipped her. We were taking a spelling test when one of the proctors came to the door. He whispered to her, and she stepped out of the room. For a minute we were silent, concentrating on the test. Then, inevitably, Bigger started to make farting noises. Bigger was always doing stupid things to get attention. Some of the other protos started to giggle, then someone else started to burp. Pretty soon, mayhem had spread across the room.

Docent Mercady stepped back in. Her face looked so strained and worried that we instantly became quiet. She said, “Class, I want you to put your pencils down and line up very quietly. We are going to Assembly.”

We knew something big was up then.

The Assembly room was awash in whispers, and Litch said in my ear, “Possit says that space aliens have landed.” Since Litch was always talking about space and aliens, I said, “Don’t be stupid.”

We had barely settled down, cross-legged on the floor, when the Matron came to the front of the room. We did not see her often—only on grave occasions. She always looked serious, but never more so than this day. She said, “Children, we have received news of an important event at Magnus Convergence. The mattergraves and electors have been contacted by a delegation from one of our star colonies founded long ago in the Machine Age. We have never known if any of them survived. Now, they have come back across space to visit us.”

There was a hum of talk all across the room. I was stunned. So Litch had been right, in a way.

The Matron raised her voice to make us quiet. “Since this is an important event, I want you to learn all about it. We are going to watch some news broadcasts.” She gave a signal to one of the proctors, and the screen came on.

We sat there for the next several hours, mesmerized by the viewscreen. The aliens had sent a message from their orbiting ship, politely requesting permission to land. We watched as their atmospheric shuttle came down, not unlike one of our aircars. We waited, breathless, as the vehicle sat there for what seemed like an eternity, motionless. Then at last the door opened, and we saw our first aliens. They looked like little squashed brown people to me. (Please don’t be offended; I expect we look strange to you, too.) Across the landing pad, the people sent to meet them waited. They were not electors or mattergraves themselves—that had been deemed too dangerous. Nevertheless, their faces became familiar as those first images were shown over and over. A pair of people—one factor and one patternist—walked forward to greet the approaching aliens. The patternist welcomed the “Members of the Community of Humanity” back to the homeworld. The aliens replied in accented but perfectly comprehensible Argot, saying they came in “brotherhood,” an antique term I scarcely recognized, and their purpose was to learn from us. This seemed like either charming humility or deep subterfuge to us, considering that they were the spacefarers. We had no idea at the time that Capellans live to learn, and it was simply the truth.

The delegates ushered the three aliens into a groundcar, and whisked them off. Nothing else happened that day, but that did not stop the commentators from filling the screen with speculation. Why had no one detected the orbiting spaceship? (We later learned that it was specially designed to be invisible to our technology.) How did the aliens know our language? (We learned that they had been studying it, and us, from space for months.) Why were there only three of them? (Magister Galele later told me they were specialists called the First Contact team. The main body of researchers had not even arrived at that time.) What were their true motives in coming here? (No one believed that they had already told us.)

Then, because they had no answers, the commentators began discussing what effect this would have on the delicate balance of power in our own society. As the discussion wore on, I found it boring and irrelevant. How could they talk about politics at a time like this? Couldn’t they see that everything had changed?

From where I sat there on the floor of my creche, it seemed as if the world was suddenly vulnerable, like a building with its top blown off, exposed to the sky. We no longer enjoyed the pleasant security of our isolation. No matter what happened, we had lost control. Just weeks before, I had discovered the threats we ourselves had created; now there was an external one. Nothing was safe. I moved closer to Docent Mercady, and she, sensing my fear, put an arm around me. I whispered to her, “Will the aliens start up the machines again?” She kissed me and said, “No. We won’t let them do that. Don’t worry, Tedla. We won’t let anyone hurt you.”

For the first time in my life, I wondered if she, or any adult, had the power to make good on such a promise.

In recreation that day, Litch and I played at being aliens. It was our way of robbing the event of strangeness, by acting it out. While most of the others played rocketball, we constructed a spaceship from gym equipment and imagination, and greeted everyone who came by, telling them we came in brotherhood.

After that first day, reports on the aliens became a regular part of our classes. We went on a night expedition outside to look at their home star, Capella Two, through a telescope built by the top roundroom in science class. We learned that their ship had set out hundreds of years ago, but the aliens themselves had only arrived recently by a magically advanced system of transport that made them into lightbeams. Docent Gambrel showed us the spectrum, so we could see the particular frequency of light they had been. Since we were all fascinated by the aliens, and would listen to anything about them, the docents learned to incorporate them in all our lessons. “You’ll need to know this if you ever meet an alien,” became a frequent refrain.

The strangest thing we learned about them was that they had no childhoods. That is how we interpreted it. They were born adults, fully differentiated, male and female. We would look at each others’ naked bodies in the roundroom, and imagine them with sexual organs. It seemed repulsive. The corollary fact that the aliens still had families raised many questions in socialization class, since the docents had always told us that only primitives lived that way, in tribalism, and true civilized amity was impossible as long as the bonds of biology were allowed to coexist with those of community. We discussed it, and I, at least, concluded that the aliens must be more socially primitive than we, despite their technological cleverness. I began to think of them as people who had never outgrown their own Machine Age.

The original sense of community we felt toward them cooled when they claimed not to be descendents of our own colonies. They traced their origin back to a place called Earth, and gently insisted that we had originated there, too, in unspeakably ancient times. Our own questionaries debated this hotly.

However, we soon grew used to seeing the three aliens’ gnomish faces on screen. They were endlessly available to answer questions, seemingly quite open with their information, up to a point. Certain questions, especially those about technology, they evaded. They explained that they would share their knowledge when they understood us well enough to know that it would not do us any harm. Having lived on Capella Two, I know this was not strictly true. They would share nothing; they intended to sell it.

After awhile I grew a little bored with the aliens. I became used to their presence on screen, and on our planet. They became oddities, not threats. I never dreamed that I would become more entangled with them than anyone else on Taramond.

***

As we grew older, the gestagogues allowed us more freedom to explore the landscape outside the creche on our own.

I loved the outdoors. It seemed as if my senses were more alive there, and I eagerly sampled all the sensations, from the smell of river mud to the stroke of wind on my face. I was feeling everything for the first time; all my emotions were sharp, unblunted by use, like coffee or herbs fresh out of the package. At times I indulged in them so extravagantly that they strained me to the limits. In those days, a melody could pierce to the bone, a sunset could bring tears of painful joy. And an unkindness could gnaw like cancer.

***

Tedla broke off suddenly, looking at Val. “I wonder if humans retain some of that freshness of perception. They told us neuters don’t—that everything in a bland’s brain becomes blunted and dull, even pain. I know it’s true I can’t sense things like I did then. It makes me wonder if I’m seeing the world muted, if there is a pitch of sensation closed to me. I wonder if everything I feel is a lesser emotion than humans do.”

“I think that’s unlikely,” Val said, thinking she had hardly ever met a person whose emotions were so close to the surface. Capellans learned to hide their minds much better. “It sounds like they told you a lot of things about neuters that aren’t true.”

“Yes, but it was all woven in with things that are true.”

“If you don’t feel the way you did then, it may have more to do with growing up than with being a neuter. I don’t feel the way I did as a child, either.”

“But how can I tell whether you sense things I don’t?”

“I don’t know,” Val said. “It’s the one thing we can never know about each other.”

***

For you, puberty is a process. To us, it is a precipice. In a single day we pass from the social state of childhood to adulthood. Physically, the transformation takes longer, but it is still abrupt by your standards. At age twelve, we are immature, undifferentiated proto-humans. At fourteen, we are fully functioning sexual beings.

The gestagogues tried their best to prepare us, but as the metamorphosis came closer, it loomed over all our thoughts, a wall beyond which we could not see. In the roundroom we talked endlessly about whether it was better to be a man or a woman, despite the adults’ best efforts to convince us there was no advantage either way. Some protos had strong opinions. Women were better because they could make lots of money having babies. Men were better because they were strong and adventurous. I could never decide. All sexual organs seemed like grotesque deformities to me. In the shower, when I thought no one was looking, I would run my hands over the places on my body where the breasts or the penis would grow. My body, the thing in the world most familiar to me, was about to turn into something alien.

Rumors and legends proliferated in the roundroom, taking up where the instructionaries left off. There were rhymes: Eating beans will produce male genes, the bite of a needletail will make you female. There were diagnostic tests: If you looked at your fingernails palm up rather than palm down, you were sure to be a man. Looking over your shoulder to see the sole of your foot was a sure sign of a woman.

The instructionaries never breathed a hint that there was any third alternative. That knowledge was passed along the way we learned most frightful and unpleasant things, in the whispered roundroom talk at night. One night a group of us was gathered around an older proto named Little Bit, who often knew secrets the rest of us admired it for, even when they were false. This night, it had an especially grave look on its face. We all had to lean close to hear as it whispered, “You know, any one of us could turn into a neuter.”

“That’s not true!” an argumentative child named Axel said. “They wouldn’t be teaching us all this stuff if we were just going to turn into pubers.” It was a filthy word. Axel resented Bit’s prestige and was trying to win our admiration by obscenity. It only made most of us uncomfortable.

“They don’t know, you see,” Bit maintained. “They can’t predict who will be a neuter any more than they can predict who will be male or female. So they have to educate everyone, even though some of us will forget it all.”

Bit looked at the frightened faces surrounding it. By now everyone in the roundroom had come over to hear. “Any one of us,” Bit said in a spooky voice. We all looked around, and most eyes came to rest on Pitter, a fat and sulky proto who was unpopular because it had been a bed wetter, which never gains you points in a roundroom. Someone whispered, “I bet it’s Pitter who’s the puber.”

The phrase sounded so funny that we began to chant it, driving Pitter into a frenzy. Its face got red and it shouted, “Stop it, you creeps! It’s not even true. Bit’s full of crap.”

“You’d better watch out not to touch them too much,” Bit said. “Neuter hormones can go right through your skin, and if you touch your eyes or your mouth after touching a neuter, well, that’s it.”

We were silent, since we had all touched neuters quite unwarily up to that point.

“There’s another thing,” Bit said. “If you touch yourself down here, you’re sure to turn into a neuter.”

No one said a word. I expect we had all done that, too.

After that, there was a marked change in our behavior. We became more distant, even hostile and contemptuous, to the blands. Before, we had viewed them with neutrality or pity, since they weren’t really our concern—merely unfortunates who could not help what they were. Now, we took them personally. They were reminders of our own vulnerability, the flaw we ourselves might hide, and so we hated them. We were learning to act like humans.

Around that time, my best friend was a proto named Zelly. It was a terribly worried child, afraid and anxious about everything. Zelly found safety in rules—knew them all, obeyed each one to the letter, and was sure to warn the rest of us when we were falling dangerously short. Despite this—or perhaps because of it—I took a perverse pleasure in persuading Zelly to do things that would have terrified it without me—and a few things that should have terrified me.

One midsummer day Zelly and I snuck away from supervised recreation to go exploring in the river bluffs behind the creche. There was a spot where the limestone cliff was eroded in steplike layers, which made for easy scrambling. Zelly followed me a little way, then stopped. “We’re not supposed to climb the cliff,” it said. “There are rattletails and sucker beetles.”

There were hazards everywhere for Zelly. I said, “I’ll go first and scare away the rattlers. You know what to do if you hear one?”

Zelly froze in place. “That’s right,” I said. We were sure the snakes could only see motion, and so we would turn invisible if we kept still.

I led the way up the cliff. Soon we could see over the tops of the aikens, and then we were at the grassy, windswept crest. Below us lay the creche, and the other protos playing on the broad natural terrace. Beyond them the valley fell away in ledges, and off in the blue distance were the river bluffs on the eastern side. To see the creche from outside, in its setting, gave me a feeling of discovery, like seeing a map of a place you knew only from ground level. It gave Zelly a feeling of acrophobia. “Come away from the edge, Tedla!” it pleaded. “You’re going to fall.”

It sounded like a neuter, and a few months before I would have told it so, teasingly; but now we knew the jibe might be true, and I stayed quiet. All the same, a moment of doubt invaded my day, like the smell of distant poison. I quickly put it out of my mind; I couldn’t think such a thing of Zelly. Besides, I told myself, if it were that easy to tell, the adults would have figured it out long ago.

A path ran along the cliff edge, and we followed it single file till we came to a spot where the gray faces of an old ruin stuck up out of the grass.

Gammadis is simply peppered with ruins, mostly of a material we call poured-stone. They are so common that no one pays much attention to any but the most lavish and well preserved. This one was neither—merely a square outline enclosing a depression of hard-packed dirt, where, it was obvious, generations of children from the creche had played. Nevertheless, it looked wondrous in our eyes.

As we explored it, we wove elaborate speculations about what the building had been. We decided it was a fort erected to guard the river valley against invading armies—since we knew from our history lessons that people in the olden days did very little but war with each other and destroy things. Soon it was a place where a pair of freedom fighters had been killed. Since this led to the conclusion that their bones would be buried inside, we got some sticks and began to dig.

“Tedla!” Zelly shrieked, leaping up from its knees. “I found it! I found a skull!”

Eagerly, I came over to look. There it was—a curved, gray-white shard protruding from the soil. One side had a shiny glaze on it. I dug around it with my stick as Zelly peered over my shoulder, and soon wrenched it free.

“It’s a piece of a dish!” I said, only a little disappointed it wasn’t more macabre. “Maybe it’s valuable.”

“Maybe it’s got a curse on it,” Zelly said in a low, thrilling voice.

We looked at each other in fascination and fear. Then we turned back to dig even harder.

Soon we had excavated some bits of rusty metal, a piece of melted red plastic, and a mysterious round glass object with raised marks we imagined to be writing. We laid them out to study.

“You know, you can get diseases from old things in the dirt,” Zelly said.

“Then I guess we’re going to die,” I said.

“We’ll die friends, won’t we, Tedla?” Zelly said. There was something earnest and anxious in its face, so I took its dirty hand in an improvised secret handshake.

“We’ll be friends forever,” I said.

We had created quite a satisfactory pile of loose dirt, and Zelly now said, “We ought to make some ammunition to defend ourselves against attack.”

There was an old square pit behind the ruins where some scummy water had collected, so now we used it to wet down our dirt and form cannonballs. As we were thus occupied, we heard someone coming up the cliff toward us. Zelly said, “An invader! Quick, Tedla, make more mud-bombs so we can hold them off.”

When the invader emerged onto the cliffside path, we saw it was just Joby, walking slowly as if winded by the climb. It came toward us, calling, “Tedla! Zelly! You’re supposed to come down.”

Obviously, some proctor had noticed our absence and sent Joby to fetch us. At my side, Zelly said in a low, venomous voice, “Filthy puber.”

The hatred in Zelly’s voice startled and frightened me. The emotion was too virulent for Zelly—cautious Zelly!—but I quickly adjusted. My friend was older, closer to being human, and had to know better than I. Besides, there was something that felt right about disobeying Joby. I was going to be human. Humans didn’t let neuters order them around. I was different from Joby. I was going to grow up, as it never would. I shouted out, “We don’t have to take orders from you!”

Emboldened, Zelly shouted, “Filthy puber! Don’t come any closer!”

Joby stopped in its tracks, a complicated expression on its face. I couldn’t tell what that expression meant, but my companion recognized it right away. “It’s afraid!” Zelly said gleefully, feeling power over another being for the first time.

“Come on, you two,” Joby said. “You’ll get in trouble. Proctor Givern wants you to come down now.”

A human would have ordered us, not wheedled. Zelly stood up, a mudball in one hand. “Get away, you defective, or you’ll regret it.”

Joby hesitated, then said, “Tedla? Are you coming?”

In answer, Zelly let the mudball fly. Joby saw it coming and turned away to shield its face; the bomb hit it on the shoulder with a thunk, spraying dirt into the bland’s thinning hair.

“Right on target!” Zelly whooped, then snatched up an armload of mudballs. “Come on, Tedla. We’ve got it on the run!”

Something had come over my friend. There was a wildness in Zelly’s face—a desperate, frightened aggression. I was awed, and caught up in it. I seized a mudball and threw it. When Joby saw that, it turned to flee.

“Sortie!” Zelly called, and leaped past the ruined walls of our fort to chase the retreating bland. I seized up some mudballs and followed. Ahead, Joby started to scramble down the steep cliff path. But the bland was old, and couldn’t move fast. We came to the clifftop above it, and began to pelt it with mudballs as it clung to the cliff, slowly trying to move farther down into shelter.

“Mutant! Spado!” Zelly shrieked.

“Puber!” I joined in. In that moment Joby wasn’t an individual; it was a symbol for all neuters, all we feared most. And we had power over it.

Zelly finally ran out of mudballs, but didn’t want to stop. It picked up a rock from the path and threw it. The rock hit Joby on the side of the head, and its footing slipped. It slid several feet down the cliff before catching a handhold again. We saw blood on its face.

That brought us to our senses. We looked at each other, and suddenly we were ourselves again. Without exchanging a word, we dashed back to the fort.

“What do I care? It’s just a bland,” Zelly said as we sat there, debating what to do. “They don’t even feel pain like we do.”

“Let’s go back down now,” I said. “Then if Joby tells on us, we can just say it’s lying, and we were never even up here.”

But Zelly was too afraid of punishment to go back, and I wasn’t going to go by myself. Before we could decide anything, we heard someone coming up the cliff. When we crept to the edge, we saw the lanky form of Proctor Givern, with Joby close behind him.

“Let’s hide,” Zelly said, eyes wide with fear.

But Proctor Givern knew exactly where to look. “Tedla. Zelly. Come out of there,” he said in a voice that told us we had never been in trouble like we were in now. When we stood quaking before him, he looked us over with disgust. “Do you think this is funny?” he said, gesturing at Joby. The neuter stood a little behind him. Its face and hair were still crusty with mud, and the trickle of blood from its cut ear was drying on its face. Its coveralls were dirty. Its eyes were cast down—shamed, I thought, for having to fetch a human to defend it from two children.

“We were just playing,” Zelly said sulkily.

“Throwing rocks isn’t playing,” Proctor Givern said harshly. “You could have hurt Joby. Would hurting a bland make you feel proud?” He stared at us, but we couldn’t answer. “Only a coward would hurt a bland. They can’t fight back; they don’t know how. Real humans protect blands. Real humans are kind to them. What do you think that says about you?”

There was a long, horrible silence. At last Proctor Givern said, “Zelly, go down to the creche. Wait in my office till I get there. Tedla, stay here.”

Released, Zelly raced away down the path. I watched it go, longing to be with it.

Proctor Givern said, “I really thought better of you, Tedla.”

“Zelly started it,” I said defensively.

“Zelly never started anything in its life. You’re the one I expected to know right from wrong. You’ve disappointed me.”

I stared at the ground, shamed and angry.

“All right. This is your punishment. You are going to spend twenty hours in the chapel in the next ten days, thinking about what you did and why you did it. If you want to talk to me about it, come to my office. Now tell me you’re sorry.”

I looked up, and the words stuck in my throat. But not because of Proctor Givern. From behind him, Joby was looking at me with the expression of someone watching a child it had cherished mature into a viper. In that moment I hated myself as I had never done before. I had forfeited Joby’s love, the only pure and simple love I had ever known, a love without reservations or judgments. I would never know that kind of love again. At the thought, tears sprang into my eyes. I was sorry, so sorry it hurt, but I still couldn’t say so, because I wasn’t sorry for Proctor Givern—I was sorry for Joby, and Joby was only a bland.

The proctor didn’t force the matter. Watching my face, he said, “All right, you can go now.”

I climbed recklessly down that cliff, blinded by tears.

Twenty hours is a long time to spend thinking about yourself and why you did something shameful, and I cannot say I used the first ten very profitably. I walked along the quiet, leafy paths, or sat in the grottoes listening to the trickle of water, or watched the fish turn lazily under the lily pads. Whenever I tried to think about myself, as I was supposed to, my mind shied away. By the end of the first day I had constructed a thousand self-justifications and defenses, with corresponding resentments against everyone else. I left the chapel angrier and less repentant than I had walked in. The second day I spent thinking about anyone but myself, cataloging every casual cruelty I had seen adults commit, in order to convince myself that I was being held to a higher standard than humans themselves could meet. By the third day I was miserable again, blaming myself for stupidity, for not thinking ahead, for letting Zelly lead me into trouble.

As I daydreamed on the fourth day, a thought occurred to me: What if there were a drug I could take that would let me live the whole year over again without getting any older? Then, immediately: What if I could just stay twelve forever, and never have to grow up? The thought was so entrancing that I sat there on the stone bench under the ferns, dreaming about it. Then a horrible realization struck me: What I was wishing for was what actually happened to neuters. They never matured. I had been wishing to be like a neuter.

The idea was so horrifying that I stood up, shaking all over, terrified that the mere thought would make it so. I had to talk to someone.

Proctor Givern was in his office. When I came in, he said, “What’s wrong, Tedla?”

“Proctor, how can I be sure I’m going to be human?” I said.

“Is that what all this is about?” he asked, as if seeing the light.

“No!” I said. It was so much more complicated. “I don’t want to grow up. I don’t want to not grow up. I just want to be me. Why do I have to change? It’s not fair.”

He saw how distressed I was, and said, “Come here, Tedla.” When I came, he gave me a long hug. Then he sat me down in a chair facing his, still holding my hands. “Tedla, everyone your age is afraid of growing up,” he said. “I was. It’s a scary thing. But once it happens, it’ll feel like the rightest thing in the world. You’ll be really glad you grew up, and you’ll never want to go back to being a proto again.”

His unquestioning assumption that I was going to grow up calmed me. He obviously saw something about me that I didn’t see. Even so, I ventured, “Are blands happy they’re blands?”

“Yes,” he said, “because that’s what they were meant to be. If we tried to make them act like humans, they’d be miserable.”

“Can you get neuter hormones by touching them?”

“Who told you that?” he asked, frowning.

“Little Bit did.”

“Well, Little Bit’s wrong. There is absolutely nothing you can do to determine your sex. It’s all a matter of biology. Neuters can’t help what they are. They didn’t do anything to get that way. The way we show we’re human is to treat them kindly and take care of them. It’s like a test of how worthy of humanity we are.”

Again, that assurance. It was as good as a guarantee to me.

Proctor Givern said, “Now I want you to go back to the chapel and think about what all this has to do with how you acted the other day.”

I went back reluctantly. By now I knew that Zelly’s punishment had been twenty hours of cleanup work—dirty and humiliating, but at least it was mindless. I had started out thinking my punishment was easier, but now I envied Zelly.

The tenor of my thoughts changed after that. The expression on Joby’s face kept coming back to me, and every time it made me more uncomfortable with myself. I was ashamed that I’d hurt Joby, but I was also ashamed to care that I’d hurt Joby. It was only a neuter. Why had that look pierced me through? At last I went back to Proctor Givern.

It was hard to frame the question. I sat there a long time, twining my legs under the chair. At last I said, “Proctor, is it wrong to love a neuter?”

He thought about it a long time before answering. “No,” he said. “We all get fond of them from time to time. It’s only natural. It can even be good, as long as we don’t get too attached or possessive. After all, they don’t belong to us.”

His answer made me feel liberated from a huge weight of shame that had been building up ever since that first taunt of “neuter-lover.” I could admit now that I loved Joby, and didn’t need to deny it to myself.

After that, thinking became much easier. I realized that I had hated Joby that day on the cliff, because love for it had been such an important part of me as a child—a part I had grown to see as shameful. I wasn’t able to simply detach myself and feel nothing toward Joby, as I should have; the feelings were too strong. Joby was my childhood, all I had valued and cherished. Now I had to leave all that behind, and didn’t want to. I had been throwing those mudballs at myself, at my past.

“I got mixed up,” I told Proctor Givern. “I thought I was mad at Joby, but it was really me I was mad at, because I was so scared.”

Proctor Givern gave me another big hug. “You’re a good kid, Tedla,” he said. It made me feel so warm I never wanted to leave his arms.

***

Val said, “Why do you think your punishment was different from Zelly’s?”

“Proctor Givern knew us,” Tedla said. “He knew what would be effective for each of us. He made me think about myself, because he knew I would.”

“We have an old-fashioned word for that,” Val said, smiling. “It’s called a conscience.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s right. He wanted me to have a conscience. It’s one of many things that made me think—still does make me think—that they expected me to be human. A conscience is a useless commodity for a bland. Their behavior is too tightly controlled; they don’t have to control themselves.”

“‘They’?” Val said curiously.

“We.”

The word seemed to come hard.

***

Shortly after, there was an event—two events, really—that affected all of us at the creche, but me in particular.

It was justification time, the yearly period when the adults have to review their lives and search their hearts to see if they have made a contribution to nature, culture, or humanity in that year. The air was full of tension and seriousness. The adults were all preoccupied and short with us.

I was struggling with an inner dilemma myself—whether to say anything to Joby. Proctor Givern had given me no advice about it, and I had been afraid to ask. Acknowledging my own emotions in the past had been one thing; acting on them in the present was another.

I kept a watch out for Joby, but though I glimpsed it a few times, there was never any opportunity to talk. Then, mysteriously, Joby seemed to disappear altogether. After five days, I finally asked one of the other blands about it. “Joby’s sick,” was the answer.

After three days of fretting, I finally went back to Proctor Givern. He was a little more relaxed than the other adults, and wasn’t impatient to see me.

“Is Joby sick because of us?” I asked. “Did we really hurt it?”

“No, Tedla.” Proctor Givern seemed to debate what to tell me. At last he said, “Joby’s been sick a long time. That’s why we’ve been cutting down its duties.”

“What’s wrong?” I said, trying not to show my alarm.

“It’s got cancer. It’s probably going to die soon.”

He sounded quite matter-of-fact, but to me the news was shattering. I had never known anyone to die before. “Can’t you do something?” I said. “Can’t you take it to the curatory?”

Proctor Givern put a hand on my shoulder. “That wouldn’t be kind, Tedla. We would only prolong its suffering if we tried to cure it. Here, we can keep Joby comfortable in its own familiar surroundings.”

“But it wasn’t even sick the other day!” I protested.

“Yes, it was. You just couldn’t tell.”

He saw how troubled I was, and said, “We have to make this kind of decision all the time, Tedla. Blands can’t decide when it’s right to end their lives, like humans can. We have to decide for them. We’d like to keep Joby around, just like you would. But it wouldn’t have a good life, only a sick and feeble one. This way is better.”

I had to accept that. But the weight of guilt was crushing. I couldn’t bear to think what Joby’s last sight of me had been, or that it never would know how sorry I was. I couldn’t think of anything else for the rest of the day. In the evening, I crept down to the clinic where we protos went if we were sick, thinking Joby might be there. I tried to peek around, not wanting anyone to know what I was looking for. But Joby wasn’t there.

That night in the roundroom I pulled Zelly aside and whispered, “Did you know that Joby’s dying?”

A look of shock and fear passed across Zelly’s face. “Are they going to blame us?” it whispered.

“No. Joby’s got cancer. It’s been sick a long time.”

Instead of remorse, I saw relief on Zelly’s face. “Oh, that’s okay then.”

Angrily, I said, “Don’t you care?”

“Why?” Zelly said defensively. “I didn’t do it. What are you blaming me for?”

Disgusted, I turned away. But I knew Zelly’s reaction was the safer, righter one. I couldn’t let on that I cared. Whatever Proctor Givern might say, the other protos would have made my life a misery of teasing.

I slept apart from the others in the roundroom that night, feeling alienated and unable to face them. The thought of Joby made my throat ache with all the regret I had to swallow. I thought of it till I fell asleep.

The next morning the postulants who oversaw us seemed grim and upset. When we came into refectory and saw all the younger protos assembled and waiting, we knew something was wrong.

The postulants instructed us to sit down at the tables without any food. All of the gestagogues were there, waiting. It seemed unnaturally quiet. At last the Matron came in.

“I have some important news to tell you,” she said. “As you may know, this is the time of justification for all the adults here. Last night, Docent Horst decided to justify himself by making space in the world for another.”

The room was perfectly silent. We all knew what she meant. He had ended his own life.

The Matron went on, “Docent Horst’s conscience called upon him to take this step, and though we will miss him, we all admire his self-knowledge and support his courageous decision.”

It was possibly the nicest thing we had ever heard anyone say about Docent Horst. He had been a heavyset, white-haired man who sweated profusely and often smelled of alcohol. The other docents had treated him with open disrespect. I had only had one class from him, and hadn’t learned much.

“Sooner or later, all of us will face the decision Docent Horst faced last night,” the Matron said. “I hope that when the time comes, each of us will have the determination he did. This afternoon, we will have an assembly to celebrate his life. The docents and proctors will gather this evening. That is all.”

She left, and the blands behind the counter began serving up our breakfasts. There was no weeping or grief; that was inappropriate, since Docent Horst had died the right kind of death, and thus justified any mistakes in his life. To weep would have implied disrespect for his decision. All the same, we were shaken and a little grave, especially those of us on the verge of adulthood. Very soon, the burden of justification would be ours. Every year we would have to decide whether we deserved to continue living.

That afternoon, the blands served up a big butterberry cake in Docent Horst’s honor, and we all ate some. There were games for the little ones, and the chorus sang songs.

I watched the blands serving the refreshments and cleaning up. They seemed completely unaffected by Docent Horst’s demise, as indifferent to the death of a human as we were to the death of a bland.

No one ever told us when Joby died. Joby simply disappeared, as if it had never existed. I suppose no one thought we would care.

***

I went through a very emotional time after that. I’m not sure anyone realized I was grieving; I’m not sure I realized it myself. It wasn’t just Joby’s death. I was grieving for the death of my childhood. I was saying good-bye to the creche and all the places I loved. I was saying good-bye to the person I had been.

I spent a great deal of time outdoors, walking the trails to the river or climbing the bluff. Often I brought along a book to read—mostly sad tales, which suited my mood. I became very interested in religion. The truth was, I desperately needed something to take me out of myself. I was maddeningly aware of my treacherous body and my undeveloped personality. I needed something to give me a nobler persona, whose eyes I could look through—so I could face the world thinking, it’s not just me inside here; it’s someone else, more worthwhile than me. Otherwise I might have perished of self-awareness.

Now I know, as I didn’t then, that emotion is itself a kind of talent not everyone has. A form of intelligence, perhaps—though not much valued by any culture I know of. The intensity of my feelings that fall was a gift—a treacherous gift.

On Gammadis, our religion teaches that all life is suffused with spirit, but that humans, unique among life forms, are able to become aware of it. Each person, they say, has a god inside—an individual emanation of the life force. To search for one’s god—to become aware of the aspect of one’s self that approaches divinity—is the purpose of worship among us. People approach it in different ways—through dance, song, meditation, even drugs—though the latter, we had been warned, might confuse us with unrealities, not help us touch what is truly real.

That fall, I became absorbed with the idea of searching for my god. The docents would have warned me not to. I was too young, my mind too unformed. But amid the roil of emotions in me I felt one constant: kinship with the landscape I had grown up in. I became convinced that this was the way I had to search: by blending my consciousness with the living things around me.

I spent hours walking down forest paths, my mind excruciatingly attuned to the trees, trying to feel their consciousness around me. I rubbed my cheek against their bark, and listened to the whispering of the leaves. I lay in the grass on top of the bluff, feeling the wind stroking my back.

One day I was coming down a forest path at a time of day when the setting sun reflected off the leaves, giving them a coppery sheen. I discovered that if I unfocused my eyes, the plants all around me seemed to be glowing. My mind filled with exaltation. I was actually seeing it—seeing the spirit that suffused the world, manifested around me. I felt the glow in myself, as well, coursing through my limbs. The entire world was incandescent with visible spirit. I felt uplifted, as if I had seen a vision.

I thought I had touched my god. After that, I had no doubt—not a shadow, not a qualm—about my humanity.

I still don’t know what it was I experienced. Sometimes I think I was right—that there was a spark of divinity in me, struggling to manifest itself. If so—if that was what I felt—I know I have Joby to thank for it. Without the shock of Joby’s death, I might never even have gone searching. If I almost became human in that moment, it was Joby who made me so.

Chapter Three

It was drawing on toward evening, and the clinic hallways were coming alive as the staff geared up for another night’s work. Val wandered down the corridor, looking for someone she knew. At last she found Joan talking intently to a woman with heavy eyebrows, heavy shoes, and a Social Services scarf. When Val waved at her, Joan broke off the conversation and came into the hall.

“You’re not turning Tedla over to her, are you?” Val asked, a little alarmed.

“No, this is other business,” Joan said. Val was surprised at the relief she felt.

“Where is Deedee?” she asked.

“Asleep in one of the detox rooms. We’ll have to wake her up soon; we’re going to need the bed.”

“I guess the picnic’s shot,” Val said, glancing ruefully at a clock.

“Never mind that,” Joan said. “Did you find out anything useful?”

“For me, yes. Very useful. But nothing like a next of kin’s address.”

“I guess that means we have to find a curatory,” Joan said without relish.

“I’ve got another idea,” Val said. She hadn’t really thought it out; it just sprang impulsively into her mouth. “I want to take Tedla home with me.”

“Oh, no. You can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t have any legal relation to this patient, Val. What if something happens? You could be liable.”

“Nothing is going to happen overnight.”

“How do you know? Tedla needs professional attention.”

“I’ll take it to a mentationist tomorrow, Joan. This is just temporary. You don’t want Tedla to have to spend the night in an institution, do you? I really think a family setting would be better.”

“But—”

“Tell you what. Why don’t we let Tedla decide?”

When she entered the room again, Tedla was staring pensively at the place where a window would be, if there were one. Its expression was resigned and fatalistic. Val said briskly, “Tedla, we’ve got a problem about what to do with you. Now, what we ought to do is transfer you to a curatory where you can get the care of some trained mentationists.”

“Whatever you think is best,” Tedla said faintly.

“Well, there’s another possibility,” Val plunged on. “You could come home with me, and be my guest till you can decide about going to the curatory.”

Tedla looked at her as if searching for hidden meanings in her offer. She went on quickly, “The copartment isn’t very big, and we’d have to put you on the fold-out in the studium, so you’d have your own room, sort of, but other than that I’m afraid it’s not very private. But Max and I would love to have you, and it would be wonderfully educational for Dierdre. If you can put up with us, it would be a real treat.” She realized she was babbling and made herself stop.

Slowly, Tedla said, “Do you think you owe me this?”

“No,” Val said. “I want to do it.”

In the silence that followed, she felt a tug of caution. “There is one thing you would have to promise me,” she said. “You must not try to hurt yourself again.”

Tedla’s eyes fell in shame.

“Do you promise?” Val said.

Tedla nodded, still not looking at her. “I promise.”

“You’re sure? I can’t risk it if you’re not.”

“Yes. It was stupid and arrogant of me, anyway. I should have known I couldn’t succeed. Please let me come with you.”

Val smiled and put a hand on the neuter’s arm, felt it stiffen at the touch, and pulled back. “Good,” she said.

She left the clinic with Deedee on one side and Tedla on the other. The alien wore a fresh bandage and some ill-fitting clothes left by other patients. It walked with eyes cast down. Some of the stimulation shops had begun to open. Val was acutely aware of the curious stares they attracted. She fingered the scarf that indicated her observer status.

“Do you know anyone here, Tedla?” she asked in an undertone.

“No,” Tedla said. “But they may know me. I’ve been around for a couple of months.”

“Doing what?”

A pause. “Nothing.”

Val glanced over. Tedla wouldn’t look at her.

A Skor was watching them strangely from a doorway. His head was completely crusted with cerebs, the bioengineered mollusks that fed on brain tissue. His yellowed eyes followed them eagerly, gleaming with the euphoria of heightened sensory perception the parasites gave.

When they got back to the copartment, Deedee went racing into the dinery shouting, “Papa! Guess what?”

Max came to the bedroom door, a packing box in his arms. He began to say something, but saw Tedla and stopped.

“Max, this is Tedla Galele,” Val said. “My husband, Max. I’ve asked Tedla over for a few nights, till we decide what to do.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Tedla said nervously.

“Uh...hi.” Max tried to hold out a hand, but the box in his arms slipped and nearly dropped; he swore. “Sorry,” he said. “We’re in the middle of unpacking. Let me go put this down. Val?” He disappeared into the bedroom.

“Make yourself at home,” Val said to Tedla, and left it standing in the gathering room.

Max closed the bedroom door behind them. “Val, what the hell...?”

“Joan had to get Tedla out of the clinic, and there was no place for it to go,” Val said quickly. “We couldn’t put it out on the streets.”

“So this is the suicidal alien?” Max said. “You’ve brought home a lunatic?”

“Who told you?”

“Joan called E.G. while we were waiting for you to show up. We were going to have a picnic, remember?”

“I’m sorry, Max. I needed to interview Tedla. Don’t worry, it’s not dangerous.”

“How do you know?”

“Give the poor soul a chance. I’m sorry I didn’t check with you first. I swear it’s only for a night or two.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Max said.

When she entered the gathering room again, Tedla was sitting on the couch listening seriously as Deedee explained one of her toys. Seeing Val, the alien rose nervously. “Should I leave?” it whispered.

“No, of course not,” Val said. “I just shouldn’t have surprised him this way. I should have called first. Come on, I’ll show you your room.”

Deedee followed them into the studium. “Do you want to play Scratcher?” she said to Tedla.

“Stop being a pest, Dee,” Val said as she rummaged in a packing box for some sheets and towels.

Tedla turned to her. “No, really, I’d like to, if you don’t mind.”

“Suit yourself.” Val shrugged. Then, to her daughter, “Tedla’s like family, Deedee. You have to share information free.”

For the first time in months, Val and Max actually sat down alone together at the dinery table for a glass of wine before dinner. They could hear a constant stream of peremptory instructions coming from the gathering room, punctuated with occasional shrieks of delight. At first Max kept glancing in uneasily.

“Are they okay?” Val asked.

“Deedee is. I’m not sure about your alien. She’s bullying it unmercifully.”

“She takes after her mother,” Val said, looking at him apologetically.

“You can say that again.” Max stretched out his legs under the table.

“Am I forgiven?” Val said, rubbing his leg with her stockinged foot.

“Don’t push your luck,” Max said, but he wasn’t serious. “You give new meaning to ‘taking your work home with you.’”

They ate picnic food for supper. While they were still at the table, Joan called to see how Tedla was doing. Val felt smugly satisfied at what a harmonious picture of family life they presented to the screen. After a few minutes of small talk, Joan asked to speak to Val privately. Val switched the call into the bedroom and went in there, closing the door.

“Mandy just called me from the clinic,” Joan said. She was frowning in puzzlement. “After we left, they got a message from WAC saying they’d noted our inquiries about Tedla Galele. They want to know if we have information on Tedla’s whereabouts.”

“Did she reply?” Val asked.

“I told her to send back a message asking who wanted to know, and why. No response yet. E.G. is very suspicious. I know it’s what we wanted, to find someone that knows Tedla—but it gives me the creeps to think they tracked us down just for asking a question. Isn’t that illegal?”

“No, but it was your proprietary information,” Val said. “You can charge them for using it.”

“Oh, sure. As if I’m going to send WAC a bill.”

“You should, Joan. It’s what keeps them from doing this more often.” Her voice was casual, but in fact, Val couldn’t remember ever having tripped off a monitor before. It meant the information was valuable.

“What should I tell them?”

“Nothing, yet. Give me the number. I’ll call them in the morning and find out what’s up.”

Deedee was full of energy and wanted to play again after dinner, but Val insisted she prepare for bed. It devolved into a longer-than-usual ritual, since Deedee had to come out to explain each step to Tedla. When she was finally washed, brushed, and in her sleepers, she crawled up on the sofa beside her new friend. Val noticed that the neuter didn’t flinch from Deedee the way it did from adults. She hoped the child was thawing the tension. Then Deedee looked up earnestly at Tedla and said, “If you’re not a boy or a girl, how do you pee?”

“Dierdre!” Val said. “That’s a rude question.”

“That’s all right,” Tedla said. “Everyone wonders, no one asks. Do you mind if I answer?”

“Only if you want to.”

Tedla turned to Deedee. “I pee the same way you do, through a hole called the urethra. Only with me, there’s nothing there but the hole.”

“I don’t have anything else but the hole, either,” Deedee said wisely. “Only boys do.”

“I think you do,” Tedla said. “You have some flaps of skin called labia, and a few other things you’ll learn about when you’re older.”

“Oh,” Deedee said, concentrating.

“Oh dear, now I can tell I’ll have to do some explaining,” Val said. Max was grinning.

“Was that too explicit?” Tedla said apprehensively.

“No, you did just fine,” Val said.

“Want to explain the rest of it?” Max said wryly.

“I would be afraid of doing it wrong,” Tedla said.

“So are we,” said Max.

Later, when everyone else was in bed and she was in her robe, Val went out to the dinery to make sure breakfast was programmed for four. Heading back to the bedroom, she paused at the studium door to listen. There was no sound from inside, so she cracked open the door. Tedla had gone to sleep with the light still on. After a moment’s hesitation, Val stepped in.

She looked down on the alien’s face. This way, in sleep, it looked very peaceful, and very young. On an impulse, she bent over and kissed the damp forehead, as she would Deedee’s. There was no reaction.

“Poor kid,” she said. “Poor lost kid.”

***

The persistent chiming of a priority message pulled Val from sleep the next morning. She lay still, waiting for Max to get it, but though his side of the bed was empty, there was no sound from the gathering room. Groaning in exasperation, she rolled out of bed and hit the preview key. When she saw it was only Joan, she answered the call.

Joan was already back at the clinic. She looked brisk and serious. “Did I wake you up? I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, that’s all right, I should be up anyway.” Val stifled a yawn, running her fingers through her thick, rat’s-nest hair.

“Well, I thought you’d want to know this. We found some information about Tedla. Mandy did, actually. She’s a perfect genius at this sort of thing. Until this year, Tedla was enrolled as a graduate student in exoethnology at the university on C4D, on an Epco scholarship. No wonder we couldn’t find any trace of our guest—we were looking on the wrong planet!”

A lot of things made more sense now.

“We sent a query to C4D for some records,” Joan said, “but all we could get was lightspeed transmission. It’ll take four days. In the meantime, we have to decide what to do. Tedla can’t stay at your home.”

“Yes. I know, Joan,” Val said. “Let me get up and start working this out.” Before Joan could cut her off she said, “Oh Joan—I’d like a copy of the recording I made there yesterday. Can you have it downloaded to my cache?”

Joan hesitated. “You know about patient confidentiality, don’t you?”

“Of course! I won’t use it without Tedla’s permission.”

“All right.”

Val stumbled into the bathroom, then threw some clothes on. No one seemed to be home. When she got to the dinery, she noticed the message light blinking. She hit it.

“Hi there, you lazy bum,” Max said. “We couldn’t wait around for you to wake up. We’re going down to the playground. See you by lunch, if you’re not still asleep.”

She could only assume “we” meant Tedla, as well. She ordered a cup of coffee and went into the studium to use her console there. The bed was made up, meticulously neat. First, she checked her cache for the interview recording; Tedla’s image filled her screen, talking softly. She was so pleased she kissed her fingers and touched them to the screen. Then she stored the recording and set out to get some questions answered.

Her first step was to look up some background information on Gammadis. What came up was oddly scanty. She chose an article labeled “Gammadis—Exploration.”

The story started, as most exploration stories did, back in the Second Diaspora, when the scattered offshoots of humanity had reached out across space to locate one another. Capella One had been the motherworld of the questships. Never again, in all likelihood, could any planet afford to make such gloriously elaborate machines, and send them out searching for life on a mere speculation. There had been dozens of questships. At first, discoveries had been common. But as the centuries had passed, and near space was explored, communications from the questships had grown fewer and fewer. Now, no one knew exactly how many were still out there, or where they were bound. They did not communicate until they found something.

The last questship to report a discovery had been targeted at an ordinary G-type star, Gamma Disciplis. When, over a hundred years ago, the monitors on Capella Two had intercepted the message reporting an urban civilization on the third planet, WAC had bid for the right to assemble an expeditionary team, gambling that the monopoly on patents, copyrights, and discoveries would repay the expenses. The explorers made the trip from Capella Two via coherent lightbeam transmission to the wayport on the ship. They spent fifty-one years en route, traveling at the speed of light—which, in fact, they were until reassembled into organics at journey’s end. They brought along a state-of-the-art paired-particle communicator, which allowed some limited instantaneous data transmission, but not, alas, instantaneous travel.

Everything had gone smoothly at first. Xenologists, geologists, biologists, economists, and industrial chemists had fanned out across the planet they christened Gammadis, short for Gamma Disciplis. They were welcomed by the inhabitants, who still kept alive traditions of their own spacefaring past and were delighted to be reunited with their kindred in the stars. And yet it soon became apparent that they were only semi-kindred. As with other isolated relicts of the human diaspora, the Gammadians had taken their own unique evolutionary path, and had formed their culture around it.

The period of goodwill had lasted only two years. Then, a critical misstep by the researchers had so enraged the Gammadian elites that they had expelled the entire scientific contingent and declared the planet off-limits. Here, the article was irritatingly vague. “Much of the information gathered by the investigators was impounded by Gammadian authorities, and the rest remains proprietary,” the article stated in its own defense.

Nowhere was there any mention of Tedla Galele—though an Alair Galele was listed as an ethnographer on the original expedition team. Thinking she might have found a hint, Val sent a query for Alair Galele’s current address. The reply came back, “Deceased.”

It was time to call in the heavy artillery. She placed a call to Magister Gossup’s office. He had been her graduate advisor, and was now her principal ally on the UIC faculty.

Kendra, his assistant, answered. “He’s busy right now, Val,” she said. “I’ll tell him to call you, but it may be a while. Did you hear? He got nominated to the Magisterium.”

“Wow. Tell him congratulations.” There had been rumors for months, but now Val realized what it meant to her. Members of the Magisterium had little time for chats with magisters minor. With sinking expectations, she said, “Well, let him know I’ve got some information he’ll be interested in.” On a hunch she added, “Say it’s about Tedla Galele.”

“He’ll know what that means?” Kendra asked.

“I don’t know. See if he does.”

She went to get another cup of coffee, but had scarcely poured it when the terminal chimed again. To her utter surprise, Magister Gossup’s cultured Vind face filled her screen.

He was the picture of controlled intelligence. Every hair on his head was cut to the same even length. His honey-colored skin was unmarked by either frown or smile lines, despite what had to be an advanced age. There was a half-serious joke in the xenology section at UIC that he had traveled so much, his molecules reconstituted so many times, that he had begun to lose definition. The only culture-specific touch about him was the carnelian caste-stone anchored in his forehead, disconcertingly like a third eye. Perhaps it was; no one but Vinds knew their exact function.

“I was pleased to hear that you called, Valerie,” he said quietly. That meant nothing; he did everything quietly, from dressing to dressing down his students. Val instinctively smoothed her hair. He always made her feel helter-skelter.

“Did Kendra give you my message?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “It was...intriguing.”

That meant there was something valuable about it. Val was very alert by now. “I have an interesting houseguest. From Gammadis.”

Anyone who didn’t know him well would have thought he had no reaction. Val saw the tiny movement of his eyebrow, and knew what intense pressure he must be under. “Tedla Galele is at your house?” he said.

“Yes.” She paused, waiting to see what he would offer for more information. She owed him stunning amounts of money.

“Does WAC know?” he asked.

“Not yet, but they’re getting close. I’m giving you first chance at this information.”

“I appreciate that, Valerie. The information is very valuable to WAC, and I expect them to be generous. Shall we say, five thousand?”

Val was speechless. It was a windfall beyond her wildest expectations. Five thousand units would send Deedee to school for a year, and free Max to pursue his life again. She caught herself on the verge of accepting gratefully. If the stakes were this high, a gamble might have an even bigger payoff. Glad that Max wasn’t listening, she said, “Actually, Magister, I’d prefer an in-kind exchange. You let me in on what’s going on, and why WAC’s looking for Tedla, and we’ll call it square.”

From the way he paused, she knew her instincts had been right: She had asked for something more valuable than five thousand units of money.

“I would prefer not to talk over a public connection,” he said. “There are some diplomatic problems involved. Can you meet me at the sand fountain outside the Court of Induction?”

If diplomacy was involved, something big had happened. Val said, “I’ll be there in twenty-five minutes.”

***

Marep to Overcon to Paratuic—each waynode on the route was a seat of learning, and an enclave of imported culture, in its own right. No other planet thrived on the new like Capella Two. Knowledge was its principal export, and its only major industry. Once, Val had protested the commodification of information along with Max and the rest of the radicals; but she could no longer afford purist principles. Information, as the saying went, was the only truly transportable commodity. It was what had supported the exploration of near space for the past few centuries—and without exploration, what good were xenologists?

The Court of Induction was an indoor plaza in a new section of the university, built from the proceeds of many lucrative research contracts. The stories-high glass ceiling was supported by tracery arches, and the court itself was full of sunlight and varied textures of stone, glass, and metal. Val caught a glimpse of herself in an architectural mirror, and realized that the surroundings made her look underdressed and undergroomed. Her thin, pointed face looked alert, like some small, wily animal’s, under her black cap of hair.

She spotted Magister Gossup from across the plaza, waiting at a cafe table near the sand fountain, sipping maté. As she crossed toward him, the bells marking the Twelve Harmonies went off—a courtesy to the Choristers, whose enclave was nearby. She nearly collided with a jingling Chorister who had stopped in midmotion to perform a tuning devolution.

When Val slipped into the seat opposite Magister Gossup, she realized that the background noise of falling sand made it impossible for anyone to eavesdrop. “Thank you for meeting me,” Gossup said evenly. He offered her some maté. She shook her head and ordered espresso from the automenu. As if continuing a casual conversation, he said, “I am curious to hear how Tedla came to be at your house.”

His face grew very grave as she told the story. At the end, he looked preoccupied. “Suicide,” he said. “And I thought this couldn’t get more complicated.”

“Magister, what is going on? You’ve got to let me in on it now.”

He paused. “How much do you know about the history of our relations with Gammadis?”

“Only what the public can find out,” she said.

“Then there are a few things you need to know.” He sat back, his normally serene face a map of concentration. “Gammadis is quite a puzzling anomaly. An extremely earthlike ecosystem, genetic stock far too similar to be anything but terraformed; yet the world shows all the evidence of quite ancient settlement, and the inhabitants themselves have no tradition of earth origin. Their social and material technologies have enormous sales potential. All in all, WAC was anticipating a windfall from knowledge acquired there. If the team had imagined how suddenly the Gammadians would turn against them, they might have sent back more information, despite the inconvenience of PPC transmission. But the expulsion took them completely by surprise. Most of their research was confiscated. WAC’s losses were enormous. Now we have only the interim reports—enough to tantalize us, not enough to profit by.”

His use of “we” when referring to WAC didn’t escape Val.

“When we were forced to vacate the planet sixty-three years ago, we naturally left the questship in orbit, tended by its AI. We left the wayport and the paired-particle communicator ready to activate again, in case the mattergraves and electors should change their minds.”

“Do you remember this?” Val asked.

“Yes, I was on Capella Two at the time.”

No one at UIC knew exactly how old he was; rumors said that he had spoken knowingly about the original colony on Capella One.

He continued, “All the Gammadians had to do was send a radio message to the AI, something well within their technological capabilities. The AI would then transmit the message to us instantaneously via PPC.”

“And did they?” Val asked.

“Apparently we underestimated their capabilities, or their tenacity. In the years following our evacuation, they not only communicated with our AI; they found a way to subvert it. Perhaps it malfunctioned. At any rate, they learned a great deal from it without our knowledge. Eventually, they managed to get to the orbiter by mechanical means.”

“Rocket technology?” Val asked.

Gossup nodded resignedly. “Once they had access to the ship, of course, they had access to the wayport on it, with lightspeed transport to Capella Two. Twelve years after our evacuation, they sent a two-member delegation to investigate us and demand redress for their grievances. They arrived three days ago. You can imagine our surprise.”

There had not been a hint of this news on the nets. “There is a delegation here from Gammadis?” Val said. “Now?” It made her appreciate WAC’s powers of information suppression.

“It presents us with a delicate diplomatic situation. WAC is extremely anxious for a resumption of contact.”

“What about the Gammadians? Do they want contact, as well?”

“I believe so, if they could be assured we will not attempt to meddle in their culture or violate their laws again. The delegates are here to evaluate us. We are on probation, as it were.”

The thought of another expedition to Gammadis made Val’s heart fly. She leaned across the table and said intently, “If we go back to Gammadis, Magister, I want to be on the team.”

He evaluated her with an enigmatic smile. “First we must convince them to allow us back.” His smile faded. “Unfortunately, Tedla’s presence here is one of the principal grievances to be ironed out. When they first asked about Tedla’s welfare, we had completely lost track of it. We led them to believe—in fact, we thought ourselves—that it was still on C4D. When we found we were mistaken, WAC launched an all-out search.”

“I understand,” Val said. She also understood why the news of Tedla’s mental condition had so upset him. It did not make Capella look good.

“What are you going to tell the Gammadians?” she asked.

“Nothing, right away,” he said, looking troubled. “First, we need to find if there is a way to repair Tedla’s problem—somehow make up for the damage we have done.”

He seemed to be taking it very personally. Val said gently, “Tedla’s problem may not be our fault.”

“I’m afraid I can’t be as sanguine as you,” Gossup said. “Tedla was never supposed to be here in the first place. Its transportation was one of the many breakdowns in our procedures during the debacle of those last few days on Gammadis. Quite a few things went on that never should have happened. From the Gammadians’ point of view, Tedla’s immigration here was little better than a kidnapping. If Tedla has suffered harm, that can hardly help but be our fault.”

Knowing how carefully planned expeditions were, and how extensively the researchers were trained, Val found it hard to imagine such a total breakdown. “How did it happen?” she said.

“Most of it can be laid at the door of Alair Galele.”

“The team’s exoethnologist?” Val said.

“Yes. He lost his objectivity about Gammadian society. He formed some sort of idea of bringing them more into line with Capellan values.”

“But that’s...self-defeating,” Val said. She had almost said “unprofitable.” Every exoethnologist she knew cursed the rapidity with which cultures blended when exposed to one another. The ethnologist’s job was often a race against inevitable assimilation. True cultural isolation was vanishingly rare in the information bath of the Twenty Planets—and correspondingly valuable. New variants of culture, like new variants of biology, were rare jewels—which was exactly why WAC wanted them.

“This man had unorthodox professional ethics,” Gossup said with a tight-lipped reserve. “He never would have been on the team if they hadn’t had so much trouble recruiting. Perhaps I am being too easy on him. He was not just misled; he was evil.”

A startled silence followed. Val had never heard Gossup speak so forcefully against someone.

He went on, “But we compounded his corruption by failing to realize what was happening. We failed to protect Tedla from him. In that way, we were culpable. I would prefer the Gammadians not know how badly.”

Val was drawing breath to ask a question, but Gossup said, “I’m sorry, I can’t be more specific, Valerie. Take my word for it.”

“So what do we do now?” Val said.

Gossup appeared relieved to turn away from the past and toward the future, where he could be in control. “The first step is obviously to get Tedla admitted to a curatory, to be thoroughly evaluated by our mentationists. I will speak to Monseigneur Bolduc at the Connuic curatory, and ask him to make a place available. They are very good, and very discreet.” He paused, looking carefully at Val. “I need not mention, Valerie, that discretion is essential. What the delegation and the public learn, and when they learn it, must be under our control.”

For the first time in her life, she had the heady feeling of controlling some truly valuable information. “I can be very discreet, Magister,” she said, “as long as I am part of the team dealing with the situation.”

He paused; perhaps, she thought, she hadn’t bargained with the proper delicacy. At last he said, “Of course. That goes without saying. We will need your help, Valerie. There is a great deal of research to do.”

Research wasn’t what she’d had in mind, but she would settle for it. After all, a magister minor couldn’t push her luck too far. “I suppose,” she said, “if I’m to help with research, that I’ll be given access to WAC’s proprietary files on Gammadis.”

Gossup paused. “I think that can be arranged.”

“Good,” she said.

“As well as a stipend,” he added.

“If you think WAC can afford it,” she said wryly.

“I’ve always enjoyed your honesty, Valerie,” Gossup said inscrutably. He pressed his thumb on the menu screen to pay for their drinks. “WAC will want to send someone to fetch Tedla to Connuic. You can come, if you like.”

“I would like,” Val said. “Besides, I think Tedla might be more comfortable having a friend along.” The thought of turning Tedla over gave her a pang, but it was the only moral thing to do. “Give me an hour before you send someone, so I can get Tedla used to the idea.”

***

She saw her family coming up the walk as she was approaching the copartment complex: Max and Tedla on either side, Deedee in the middle, holding Tedla’s hand. The neuter was still wearing the scrounged clothes from the clinic: baggy, dilapidated pants and a clashing pullover. Between that and the bandage on its head, Tedla looked like a good candidate to be locked up in a curatory.

Deedee saw her and came racing down the pumice walkway. “Mama! I learned a song! Do you want to hear it?” Without waiting for an answer, Deedee sang out,

***

Inky dinky diddle die

Tell a patternist a lie

She will sell it by and by

Inky dinky diddle die.

***

“That’s very nice, Deedee,” Val said.

Max and Tedla had come up during this performance. Val looked at Tedla and said, “Gammadian, I presume?”

Tedla blushed. “It’s not a very polite limerick, I’m afraid.”

“I won’t tell if you don’t.”

Deedee pulled on Tedla’s hand. “You were going to come see Biff.”

“All right,” Tedla said.

“We’ll join you in a second,” Val said. They watched Deedee dragging Tedla to the door. “They’re getting inseparable,” Val said with some misgivings.

Max looked at her inquiringly. She said, “I’ve been busy this morning, and found out a lot. Max, you’ve got to keep this absolutely quiet, but there’s a delegation from Gammadis here, negotiating about reopening their planet. WAC has been looking high and low for Tedla. I’ve managed to wangle myself a contract with them in exchange for letting them know where Tedla is. It could be really profitable.”

She had expected him to be overjoyed, but he only said, “What happens to Tedla?”

“It’ll be admitted to a curatory for treatment.”

“If you want my layman’s opinion,” he said, “Deedee’s better therapy than a whole herd of mentationists.”

Val felt a pang of self-doubt.

When they came into the copartment, Max went to order lunch, and Val went into Deedee’s room. She found her daughter and the alien both sitting on the floor conferring over a toy.

Val said, “Tedla, I’ve got to find some better clothes for you. You look like a ghoulnight effigy in those. Come here, I think some of Max’s clothes might fit you.”

Tedla rose and followed her obediently, but said, “I don’t mind these clothes, really.”

“Well, you’ve got an appointment this afternoon at the Connuic curatory. I don’t want them to think I dressed you out of the recycle bin.” She went to Max’s closet and chose some pants that had gotten too tight for him, and a white shirt.

“Nothing too masculine,” Tedla said nervously. “I hate it when people treat me as if I were a man.”

Surprised, Val said, “Don’t worry, we’ll be in UIC; it’s gender-neutral.”

“There’s no such thing,” Tedla said. “You think so, but laws can’t change people’s instincts.”

She smiled. “I think you overestimate how steeped in sexuality we are. It doesn’t dominate our waking thoughts, you know.”

“You’re not even conscious of it, for the most part, but it’s always there. It’s very subtle: levels of formality, types of language, deference, rivalry, respect. Even your voices and the way you hold your bodies change, depending on which sex you’re with. I don’t know why you don’t find it oppressive, except that you’re so used to it.”

This statement would have surprised her before this morning. “So,” she said, “you were a student of xenology at C4D.”

“Oh. Yes.” Tedla looked as if she had reminded it of something that had happened decades ago, and had long since ceased to be relevant.

“Who did you study with?”

“Magister Delgado.”

“He’s good. You must have been very good yourself, to get in his program.”

Tedla looked away uncomfortably. “No. I wasn’t any good. He took me on as an experiment, to see if I could do it.”

“And could you?”

“No. I dropped out.”

“Why?”

Tedla paused a moment, as if trying to remember. “It wasn’t what I expected. It seemed as if we grad students were like a pack wrestling for dominance, determining who was the alpha male through the size of his bibliography.”

Val broke out laughing. “Yes, that’s right,” she said. Seeing Tedla’s startled look, she realized it hadn’t intended to be funny. She said, “Maybe you analyze too much, Tedla.”

The neuter shrugged. “It’s what I was taught. I don’t have any other skills.”

Val chose a different shirt. “Is this non-gendered enough?”

Tedla inspected it. “I suppose so.”

Tedla went into the studium to change, and Val sat down at the dinery table. Max said, “Did you tell Tedla?”

“Not the whole story,” Val said uncomfortably. “I got a critique of Capellan gender relations. I never know if I’m going to be talking to a child or a visiting xenologist. Why is this so hard, Max?”

In a low voice, Max said, “We could fight them, you know. They’ve got no right to control Tedla’s life. If Tedla wants to stay here, it has a perfect right.”

Val looked up in disbelief. “Go up against WAC? Maybe you can fight them. I’ve got a career.”

He gave her a long look, but didn’t answer.

Soon, lunch arrived, and Max called Deedee in to the table. Since there was no sign of Tedla, Val got up, tapped on the studium door, then looked in. Tedla was dressed, but sitting on the bed looking pensively at the picture of Deedee Val kept on the terminal. She saw at once that the mood had changed. She closed the door behind her. “Tedla?” she said softly.

Tedla wiped its eyes, then glanced at her self-consciously. “I’m sorry,” it said. “I was just thinking.”

Val sat down beside it. “What of?”

“It’s silly.”

“No, tell me.”

Tedla paused, not looking at her. “They say we’re not capable of love. They say all blands can feel is a kind of dumb, animal devotion. But I think of those blands who raised us, and I think of Deedee...” It turned to look at her. “What is it you feel for her? What is it like?”

“I don’t think I can describe it,” Val said. “If you feel it, you just know it’s love.”

“I wish there were some way for me to feel it,” Tedla said. “I envy you so much. To be able to give yourself to someone else, to have someone who trusts you like they trust the sun to rise, and to deserve it. It seems like something worth living for, to have a person you would never let down.”

Touched, Val took Tedla’s hand and squeezed it. This time, Tedla didn’t draw away.

“I wish there were some way to protect her,” Tedla said softly, “so she would never have to experience ugliness, or malice, or betrayal.”

I wish there were some way to protect you, Val thought.

They sat in silence for a while, holding hands.

There was a tap on the door, and Max looked in. “There are some goons from WAC at the door,” he whispered.

The moment was gone. But somehow, Val knew her heart had turned.

Briskly, she stood to evaluate the new clothes. “That bandage has to go,” she said. “It makes you look deranged.” She fetched a scissors and snipped it off, then brushed Tedla’s hair over the scab. Then she made Tedla stand up. The effect was rather masculine; she found it quite attractive, but was careful not to say so.

“Tedla, you don’t mind going to the curatory, do you?” she said.

“No,” it said. “I know there’s something wrong with me.”

A part of her ached as she turned to the door.

They weren’t goons, of course—merely two well-dressed young men with security badges. To Val’s surprise, one of them was from Epco. Polite and businesslike, the WAC man led the way from the copartment.

As they headed toward the waystation, Tedla whispered to her, “Why are these men here? Do they think I’m dangerous?”

“No, of course not,” she said. “It’s—well, a professional courtesy.”

“I see,” Tedla said, as if unconvinced.

It was evening in Connuic and Gomb was high in the sky, but since the curatory functioned on university time, everyone was still on dayshift. They were met in the lobby by a youngish man with a smooth, pale face and a fashionably receding hairline that gave him a large-brained look. He shook Val’s hand cordially and introduced himself as Magister Surin, a mentationist. Then he looked past her and said, “And this must be Tedla.”

He didn’t offer to shake Tedla’s hand, a fact Val noted with an irrational surge of resentment. She glanced apologetically at Tedla, but the neuter appeared not to have noticed. Surin said to Tedla, “If you’ll come with me...” His voice signalled that he was taking over.

Val watched them go off together. The two goons were still at her side, and for a moment she had a ludicrous thought that they had been sent to guard her, not Tedla. The WAC man said, “I believe Magister Gossup is upstairs waiting for you, Magister Endrada. I can take you there now, if you like.”

“Yes. Please,” Val said.

The top floor of the curatory was quiet with private wealth. They passed down a corridor sumptuously furnished in rare antiques: hand-knotted Malvern wall hangings, Gundic roof tiles, a mint-condition Terran hubcap in a theftproof box. When she entered the meeting room, three men and a woman rose from leather seats. Magister Gossup made the introductions: Monseigneur Bolduc was the senior curator—a thin, delicate-looking, white-haired man. Pym and Shankar were capitalists. Pym was from WAC; Shankar, the woman, was from Epco. They had the look of people who could buy the curatory lock, stock, and barrel. The curator had the look of someone who knew that. The strong smell of politics filled the room.

“Thank you for coming,” Pym said, holding her hand slightly longer than necessary. He looked in his fifties, but it was probably a surgical youthfulness. He went on, “We are glad that you have signed on to help us, Magister Endrada. WAC will put your expertise to good use.”

He spoke like he owned her. Val felt a moment of rebellion, then stifled it. He did own her, as long as she needed that stipend.

The capitalist from Epco smiled warmly at her and said something complimentary. Val wondered again how Epco had gotten involved in the short time since she had spoken to Magister Gossup. Things moved fast in the infomarket world.

They all sat around a coffee table by a window looking out on a spangled cityscape of lights, lit twilight pink by the gas giant in the sky. There were the usual polite offers of drink, and comments on how the week had simply flown by. Val was acutely aware that she was on exhibit, being checked over for trustworthiness. At last Shankar said to her, “We are in your debt for your quick action in finding Tedla for us, Magister Endrada. We had grown quite stumped as to its whereabouts since leaving C4D. There is no telling how long we might have looked if you hadn’t been so alert.”

At last remembering something Joan had told her, Val said, “Tedla was on an Epco scholarship?”

“Yes. We were extremely pleased with its progress, and were looking forward to giving it a contract. Another month, and it would have had a degree. Yes, Tedla has the best education Capella can offer, purchased at considerable expense.”

So that was why they were involved. They didn’t want their investment to go to waste. If WAC owned Val, Epco owned Tedla.

“It has occurred to us,” Monseigneur Bolduc said with a slight hesitation, “that the education itself might be what unbalanced Tedla’s mind. No Gammadian asexual has ever tried to compete in a Capellan-class institute. The stress might have caused harm.”

The same argument had once been used to deny an education to unpopular minorities. Val didn’t like the sound of it. She quoted the old slogan: “Culturally appropriate education?”

For a moment they all looked startled, and Val wished she had reined in her tongue. Bolduc said, “That’s not what I intended to suggest.”

Pym said, “No, of course not.”

Shankar looked at Val with an implicit wink, as if she were a secret ally.

“We have actually been quite impressed with the Gammadian state of knowledge in certain areas,” Pym said conversationally. “You should have heard the delegates talking genetics with the specialists at Paratuic. It was above my head, I can tell you that. It seems they are in the market for methods of artificial gestation. They have difficulty keeping their population up—not exactly a problem on the other worlds!” He chuckled. “Maybe we need to call in Imachinations.” It was a company famous for erotic simulations.

A little coldly, Shankar said, “That might be counterproductive.”

“That’s right,” Pym said jocularly. “Synthetic experiences aren’t what they need. They need the real thing.”

Val decided it was time to change the subject. “Do you think the delegation is well disposed toward us so far?”

“Oh, yes,” Pym said. “The key was our offer of reparations. They saw we were serious then. No hurt so deep a little money can’t cure it, eh?”

It was clear he was boasting for Shankar’s benefit, needling her. Val wondered what the Gammadians made of Pym.

“Now,” he said, “all we have to do is make sure nothing interferes with their good impression. We paid too much to throw it away.” There was a hardness in his voice that made Val look at his eyes, and she saw in them a ruthlessness that made her blood run cold.

Barely half an hour of uncomfortable conversation had passed when Magister Surin, the mentationist, showed up at the door. No one introduced him; apparently they all were acquainted. Val noticed the smoothness and assurance in Surin’s manner, as if this were an audience he was at home with.

The mentationist sat down on the couch by the coffee table, and with a few deft movements activated a hidden control console in the table surface. A 3-D display vitrine rose from it. Surin dimmed the lights, then called up a colored diagram. It was roughly spherical, but formed from a myriad of branching lines radiating from the center.

“This is a graph of the brain function scan we just performed on Tedla,” he said.

“That was fast work,” Val said.

“The scan doesn’t take long,” Surin said, as if to an amateur; “interpreting it does.” He then called up a second diagram. It was similar, but less complex. “This is the scan that was done when Tedla first arrived on Capella Two twelve years ago, which Mr. Pym has kindly made available to us.”

Pym acknowledged the credit with an “it was nothing” gesture. Val wanted to gag.

“For comparison,” Surin said, “here is the benchmark ‘normal’ Capellan scan.” The third diagram was very different from the first two—much more concentric and symmetrical. “Of course, we don’t have a benchmark Gammadian scan,” Surin said.

“What about our visitors? Could we get one from them?” Val asked.

Surin looked at her in disbelief, as if she truly hadn’t gotten the point. She felt herself turning red. Of course—she had been thinking as if the point were to cure Tedla, not to hide its condition from the delegation.

“I am not an expert at this,” Shankar said. “What can you tell from these scans?”

Surin said, “Well, obviously the subject’s mental development has been very uneven. You can see how overdeveloped the chart is on this side, and how little has taken place in the obverse quadrant. That in itself leads to unbalance. Of course, there is no way for us to add complexity where it’s lacking—only life experience and learning can do that. But we can reduce complexity in the sector where it’s gotten out of control. That ought to help.”

“Good,” Pym said, as if it were all settled. “I knew I could count on you.”

Alarmed, Val said, “What are we talking about, besides branches on a diagram? What do these ‘overdeveloped sectors’ represent?”

“Hard to say, without more research,” Surin said. “In Capellans, alterations in this right anterior sector can affect abstract thought, language, certain memories. Without a Gammadian scan, we’d be working in the dark, more or less. The safest thing would be to bring the chart back into line with what it was twelve years ago.”

“How would you do that?”

“The basic options in brain alteration are always electrical, chemical, and biological. Biological is most reliable, but takes the longest.”

“We don’t have much time,” Pym said.

Val pressed on, “What effect would brain alterations have on the patient?”

The mentationist glanced at her as if she were a traitor to question him in front of the capitalists—as if playing the game right meant presenting a united front. “Tedla would become closer to the person it was when it arrived here.”

“Would it lose memories? Skills?”

“Both. Mental alteration always affects memory and personality. It will also flatten affect—a desirable result in this case, from what I can see.”

“Yes, yes. We can trust you specialists to work things out,” Pym said.

Shankar seemed less willing to cut off discussion. “We would have difficulty supporting any solution that jeopardized our investment,” she said.

“Unfortunately,” Surin said, “it’s quite possible that your investment has jeopardized itself. Comparing the two charts, it’s clear that Tedla’s education has resulted in an unstable pattern of mental development, the upshot being self-destruction. I don’t know how to get around that.”

It was quite a sweeping diagnosis, Val thought, on the basis of half an hour’s observation. Almost as if it had been decided in advance.

“Have you consulted Tedla about this?” she said. “Surely the main question is what Tedla wants.”

They all looked at her coldly. Bolduc was the one who answered. “Do you think Tedla is in a state of mind to make a rational decision?”

Val had to restrain herself from sarcasm. “I think so,” she said. She looked at Gossup, wondering why he was so silent. He was watching her intently. She suddenly wondered if he had set her up to fight this battle for him. Why?

Surin said, “Personally, I think it’s inhumane not to act promptly. The subject is clearly suffering.”

“We’re not talking about a subject” Val said. “We’re talking about a human being.” She could feel herself losing objectivity. She had to pull back, or she wouldn’t be credible. Emotion was never credible. Altering her voice, she said, “As a xenologist, I feel that Tedla’s memories constitute a resource we shouldn’t squander. Tedla is a potentially valuable informant. It has a unique viewpoint.”

“Not in its present state of mind,” Surin said. “We’re dealing with a very sick human being who deserves the best treatment we can give.”

“We need Tedla’s information and advice about Gammadis,” Val argued.

Surin shot back, “We also need a functioning neuter to present to the delegation.”

Finally, they had gotten to the bottom line.

At last Magister Gossup spoke up. “How long would you need to make these alterations, Magister Surin?”

The young man said promptly, “If we go the electro route, I can have the patient functioning well enough to present a normal aspect to the world in three days. A true cure takes longer, of course.”

“Then we have some time,” Gossup said. “We can keep the delegation otherwise occupied for at least a week. Perhaps the thing to do is to allow Magister Endrada to conduct some interviews, and preserve the most valuable of Tedla’s memories, if that’s possible. We can reevaluate in five days.”

No one seemed terribly satisfied with this, but no one contradicted it, either. The perfect compromise, Val thought. How useful to have a Vind diplomat in the room. And yet, she could not shake the feeling that Gossup would never have had a chance to solve the disagreement if he hadn’t set it up in the first place.

After some strained cordialities, Bolduc and Surin left, discussing technical details. Gossup rose; Val realized that was her signal, and stood to take her leave.

“I know we can trust you to make this work,” Pym said pointedly, shaking both Gossup’s and Val’s hands. When Shankar’s eyes met Val’s there was a conspiratorial congratulation in them.

“I need oxygen,” Val said when she and Gossup escaped from the room.

Without a shadow of expression, Gossup said, “Valerie, I need to point out that in this situation, tact is absolutely vital.”

“I’m sorry, Magister,” Val said contritely.

“Surin is very good,” Gossup said. “I have no doubt he can effect a cure.”

“He’s damned eager to tamper with Tedla’s memories,” Val said. “You’d think Tedla knew something the delegation shouldn’t find out.”

Gossup stopped walking and stood stock still. “That is a rather ugly accusation, Valerie. I wouldn’t make it lightly, if I were you.”

“I didn’t mean anything, Magister,” she said. “I was just talking.”

“Please don’t ‘just talk’ in this situation.”

They had come to the elevator, and as Gossup pushed the button, Val said, “I’d like to see Tedla before I leave.”

“Yes, that’s where we’re going.”

They descended to the seventh floor. Here, the corridors were bright, antiseptic, and very quiet. From time to time staff ghosted past, but most functions seemed to be on automatic. Magister Gossup, silent in his soft-soled shoes, led the way to a desk where a security officer sat, surrounded by monitors. Gossup instructed the man to add Val to the list of authorized visitors. Impassively the man took her thumb scan and picture, then handed her a slate to sign. “This is a nondisclosure agreement,” he said.

She hesitated a moment, but it looked like a standard patient confidentiality form, so she signed. The security man took it back and noticed her name. “Endrada,” he said. “I’ve got something else here for you.” He punched a code into a small safe and took out a plain envelope, handing it to Val. It had a magnetically coded card in it.

“It will get you into the relevant WAC files,” Gossup explained.

“Thank you,” Val said. The security man was holding out another slate for her to sign. This nondisclosure agreement was six pages long and full of whereases, so she just signed without reading. Then she followed Gossup down the corridor to a nondescript set of doors she took at first for another elevator. He pressed the button with his thumb and keyed in a code.

When the doors opened, Val was startled to realize it was a wayport. Gossup gestured her in.

She stepped in
and out again into a windowless, anonymous corridor that could have been in the same building, or a thousand miles away. There was absolutely no way of telling. When Gossup stepped into the corridor beside her, he said, “The port is the only way in and out, and it’s programmed only to admit certain people.”

“Why all the security?” Val said.

“The networks would love this story,” Gossup said. “We don’t want the delegation to hear about it that way.”

They passed another desk where a guard sat watching a bank of monitors, all blank but one. Gossup ushered her into an observation room that reminded her of the one in the clinic where she had first seen Tedla. When Gossup hit the switch and the window into the next room turned transparent, it was as if she had stepped back in time. “My god!” she said.

Tedla was huddled in a chair, just as it had been at the clinic. The clothes she had chosen were gone; it was dressed in a brief hospital smock. The look of desperate agitation was back.

“What have they done?” she said. “Tedla was much better than this when I brought it in. They’ve traumatized it somehow.”

Gossup was looking into the next room with a curious expression of regret. “Its mental state is very fragile, Valerie. What seemed like improvement to you must have been tenuous. We need to make it stronger.”

She knew he was right, but couldn’t help her anger. “It seems so inhumane, this way. Locking it up like a prisoner, erasing its personality.”

“I wish there were another way,” he said. “I wish we had all the time in the world. We don’t.” His voice was softer and more sympathetic than she had ever heard it. A revelation struck her: this was where Magister Gossup’s emotional life lay—with his aliens, his research subjects. He felt a bond to them he never felt to his own kind.

Gossup became aware of Val watching him, and his expression turned neutral again. “Would you like to speak to it?”

“Yes,” Val said.

He ushered her into the hallway and to an adjoining door. When she paused for him to unlock it, he said, “Go ahead, it’s a sensitive knob. It will open for anyone but Tedla.” He turned back to the observation room.

When she entered, Tedla turned listlessly to see who it was; then, recognizing her, it sprang up with a desperate look of hope. “Val! Can we go home now?”

“What happened? Where are your clothes?” Val said.

Tedla looked down self-consciously. “They took them away.” In a low, intense voice it said, “Please get me out of here. They’re running tests, scanning me a thousand ways. They gave me two injections and wouldn’t tell me what they were. They took samples of everything—tissue, blood, urine, stool. I can’t stand this. Please take me home.”

It was breathing very fast, and its fists were clenched tight. “Shhh,” Val said, and put a hand on its arm; it flinched away as if her touch burned. “Calm down, Tedla,” she said.

The neuter put its hands over its face, struggling visibly to regain control. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” it said. “It just reminds me too much—I’ll tell you when we get home.”

“Sit down,” Val said, and pulled up a chair. Tedla crouched edgily in the chair, watching her intently. “Has anyone explained to you what’s going on?” she said.

Tedla shook its head.

Val tried to make her voice very calm. “Well, to begin with, they want you to stay here for a while.”

“No!” Tedla pleaded.

“They want to make you better, Tedla, and there’s no way to do that without tests and observation.” She drew a long breath, aware that her words were being overheard. “The problem is, we don’t know what’s normal for you. The mentationist you met wants to do a procedure that could help you very fast, but the price is, you might lose some memories. You would become much more like you were when you first arrived.”

She had expected a panicky response, but there was none. Tedla simply sat watching her, very quiet.

“Do you understand?” Val probed.

“Yes,” it said.

“You need to think about it. The treatments will change you. How old were you when you came here?”

“Seventeen,” it said.

“And you’re what now?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“That’s a lot of years to lose.” Val knew she would fight fiercely if anyone were offering to do it to her. But she was not the suicidal one.

Tedla said, “They just erase parts of my life?”

“It’s one side effect.”

“Which parts?” it said.

“The painful ones, hopefully.”

Tedla closed its eyes, as if to look inside. “That’s everything,” it said softly.

Val felt a terrible misgiving. For a moment she tried to stay properly detached, but it was useless. She had to throw caution away. “If you don’t want this, Tedla, all you have to do is say so. We’re still under UIC law here; I don’t think they can treat you against your will without taking you to court, and they’re not going to do that. So if you feel strongly, you can demand to leave. You’ve got to stand up for yourself; I can’t do it for you.”

Softly, it said, “They are distinguished magisters, aren’t they, the ones who want to cure me? They must know what’s best for me.”

“Oh, please!” Val said. “You’re nearly a magister yourself. You know it doesn’t confer any godlike wisdom.”

“That’s not true!” Tedla clutched the chair arm tight. “I’m not even close to being a magister. Ask anyone; I wasn’t making it at C4D. I couldn’t have graduated. I’ve got to trust people with more learning.”

Val would have liked to repeat Shankar’s glowing description of Tedla’s record, but the neuter gave her no chance. “They’re right,” it said. “I’ve become something that’s not natural, something I was never meant to be. You Capellans have taken me and stuffed all this useless complexity into my brain. I’m not authentic any more. Before coming here, I couldn’t have described myself or my home to you, I was too much a part of it. You’ve made me step outside it all, so I can look back and observe it. Now I can analyze anything—I can’t stop analyzing—but I can’t be anything. I’m not Gammadian, I’m not even a bland any more. I can’t ever be unself-conscious again, unless you take that away.”

Appalled, Val said, “Tedla, stop. Listen to yourself. You want us to take away your self-awareness?”

“Yes!” it said earnestly.

“You think that will make you content?”

“That’s what blands are like!” Tedla said. “They’re complacent, placid creatures, like cattle. They can endure the most horrible privations, degradations, things you can’t imagine, and still they’re happy. Nothing can shake them. That’s how I was meant to be. That’s how I was, once. If you can just turn back time, and take away this self-awareness, then I won’t feel this way. Or at least I won’t know it.” It looked at her with eager anxiety. “How soon can they do it?”

“Five days,” she said heavily.

“Can’t they do it now, today, so I can go home?”

“No! You need to think about this, Tedla. The change will be permanent.”

“You shouldn’t let me think about it.” There was a haunted look in its eyes. “I’ll just have time to get scared. You shouldn’t have told me.”

A thousand alarms were going off in Val’s mind. She forced herself to say calmly, “This is entirely your decision, Tedla. I just want to say one thing. I value you just the way you are, self-awareness and all.”

Tedla looked at her in frozen agitation. “You think I’m wrong?”

If she said yes, she knew Tedla would simply surrender to her judgment. For a moment she was tempted—but only for a moment. “I think you’re the only one who can tell if you’re right or wrong. Whatever you decide, I’ll support you.”

Tedla looked as if her words were distilled essence of treachery. “I’m not supposed to have to make decisions,” it said. “Only humans are supposed to make decisions.”

“Then I’ve got bad news for you, kiddo,” Val said. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re as human as they come.”

Tedla closed its eyes and leaned back with an expression of utter misery on its face. Val sat waiting, but the neuter said no more. At last she rose.

“Where are you going?” Tedla’s eyes snapped open.

“To get your clothes,” Val said.

“Don’t leave me here alone. Please. Come back.”

“I will.”

When she entered the observation room, Magister Gossup was sitting there, staring through the window, a terribly pensive look on his face. When Val sat down beside him, he said slowly, “This is much more complicated than I anticipated.”

“You’re telling me,” Val said.

***

She called Max to let him know she wouldn’t be home any time soon. He wanted to know what was going on. “I can’t tell you now,” she said.

“You mean can’t” he probed, “or don’t want to?”

“Can’t,” she said.

He understood. “Joansie called,” he said. “I told her what I knew.”

“Be careful,” she said, not wanting to get into it.

When Val returned to Tedla’s room, the neuter was dressed again, but still looked horribly uneasy. “It’s this place, this room,” it whispered. “It reminds me of things.”

“What sort of things?” Val said, but Tedla wouldn’t answer.

If they were still in Connuic, Val thought, it would be near dawn outside; but in this windowless place, there was no telling. The lights in the corridor were beginning to dim for evening shift. There was a screen and terminal in the room, so she asked if Tedla wanted to watch a show, but it shook its head. She sat down at the terminal anyway and accessed her home console. “Would you like to talk to Deedee?” she said.

“Not from here,” Tedla said.

Val set the terminal to record and transmit a copy to her home. The red light blinked; she cleared the screen and went to sit in the chair beside Tedla’s.

“What does it remind you of?” she said quietly.

Hesitantly, Tedla said, “I’ve never told anyone this, not even Magister Galele. But if the treatment is going to make me forget it, someone needs to know.”

“I think you’re right,” Val said.

Leaning forward so Val could hear, Tedla began to tell her.

DARK WATER'S EMBRACE - Excerpt

Stephen Leigh

Phoenix Pick

An Imprint of Arc Manor

Dark Water’s Embrace copyright © 1998, 2009 Stephen Leigh. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Cover based on artwork provided by Stephen Leigh.

Interior sketches copyright © Stephen Leigh. Used with permission.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Rider, Manor Thrift and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

ISBN (Digital Edition):  978-1-60450-461-3

ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-401-9

www.PhoenixPick.com

Great Science Fiction at Great Prices

Visit the Author’s Website at:

http://www.farrellworlds.com

Published by Phoenix Pick
an imprint of Arc Manor

P. O. Box 10339

Rockville, MD 20849-0339

To Becca and Guy

Because.

*

And, as ever, to Denise, with whom I’ve mingled jeans and genes both.

***

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge The Life and Death of a Druid Prince, by Anne Ross and Don Robins (Simon & Schuster 1989)—an excellent book which gave me the initial “what if” impetus to this novel, however wildly divergent it actually is. Look up the book and read it—it’s one of the most fascinating archeological detective stories you’ll ever come across.

For some interesting speculation and insight into the causes of why species disappear, I would also like to recommend David M. Raup’s Extinction (Norton, 1991).

I’d also like to thank Dr. Rebecca Levin for her input into the potential biology of the Miccail. Any errors of extrapolation and science are mine, not hers.

***

Where Did That Come From?
An Introduction to Dark Water’s Embrace

One question—in fact, the question—a writer is most often asked by new writers is this: where do you come up with the ideas for your stories? I can only shake my head at that one. Story ideas are floating everywhere around us; I find it hard to avoid them. You have to push them aside just to go out and get the paper in the morning. All that’s required is to be open-minded and curious.

In fact, for the book you’re holding in your hands, I can actually relate the moment the spark first flared. Well, actually it was two moments.

The first was a conversation with some friends. It was one of those rambling, genial, and relaxed discussions that good friends have, our conversational gears lubricated by a bit of wine. Somewhere along the way we started talking about sex—not human sex actually, but (because one of the friends is a veterinarian) feline sex, and how it’s sometimes difficult to tell a male kitten from a female one. Someone remarked that men and women often seemed more like alien species. I remember saying something along the lines of “Huh...I wonder what things would be like if we had three genders instead of just two...” and that took us into speculation about what role a third gender might play...

We didn’t really spend much time talking about it, and the conversation quickly drifted on to other topics from there. But the thought of a third gender and what that might represent stuck with me. I gave it to the subconscious to chew on for awhile.

At the same time, I was reading a book: The Life & Death Of A Druid Prince by Anne Ross and Don Robins. It’s an archeological detective story about the discovery of a bog body in England, and I found it fascinating. While I was reading it, I played the “What if...” game in my head—what if human explorers on an alien world came across an alien bog body and had to decipher what the former inhabitants of the world might have been like from that....That woke something inside: I suddenly had a strong image of the scene in my head. I also knew, too (as my subconscious stirred with beautiful synchronicity) that the alien bog body had to be neither male nor female, but Something Else, and that this had to be vitally important to the survival of the humans involved.

I immediately went to the computer and wrote that scene because it was so vivid—it still exists (substantially changed) as the opening for Dark Water’s Embrace. All the rest started to flow from there. If you’d like a really comprehensive view of the worldbuilding and my thought processes in putting together Dark Water’s Embrace, go here: http://www.farrellworlds.com/
oldpages/worldbuilding1.html and you’ll get the whole story in far more detail than you might like...

Dark Water’s Embrace remains a book that I’m proud to have written. It explores prejudice: mostly gender prejudice, but also fear of the unknown in general. The sequel novel, Speaking Stones, continues that process, focusing far more on racial prejudice. I’m pleased that both of these books will now be available again. I’m also pleased that Arc Manor has decided to include the appendices that were left out of the original novel, and has included the illustrations that ‘Anaïs’ drew as her reproduction of the bog body. And hey, this cover’s much better than the original!

I hope you enjoy the book as much as I enjoyed writing it. You’re always welcome to browse over to www.farrellworlds.com and tell me what you think.

Stephen Leigh

Cincinnati

October, 2008

Discoveries

***

context:

Elena Koda-Schmidt

The autumn day was as hot as any in recent memory. The temperature was nearly 10°C, and Elena paused to unbutton her sweater and wipe away the sweat that threatened to drip into her eyes. Near the tree line bordering the river a kilometer away, the dark waters of a pond glittered in the sun: Tlilipan, it was called, “the place of black water.” The peat-stained shallow lake was the last vestige of a much larger parent, now just a marshy wetland. Further down the peat bog, Elena could see Faika Koda-Shimmura and Aldhelm Martinez-Santos—they were kissing, a long, oblivious embrace that made Elena feel vaguely jealous, watching. Faika was ten and had reached her menarche.

Elena suspected that her brother Wan-Li was going to be disappointed when she told him. Wan-Li had spent the night in the Koda-Shimmura compound with Faika a few days before. It seemed he hadn’t quite made the impression he’d thought he had. Elena remembered her own menarche year, and how she’d experimented with her new sexual freedom.

The cart was nearly full of peat; Elena leaned her shovel against the wheel and rubbed her protruding stomach with callused hands. She loved the swelling, surprising curve of her belly, loved the weight of it, the feeling of being centered and rooted. Her roundness made her believe that despite the odds, her baby would be perfect. Her baby would live and give her grandchildren to dandle on her knee when she was past childbearing herself. She stroked the hard sphere of her womb and the baby kicked in response. Elena laughed.

“Now you be still, little one. It’s bad enough without you stomping on my bladder. Mama’s still got a lot of work to do before we get home.”

With a sigh, Elena picked up the shovel and prepared to attack the peat once more. She was working an old face, several feet down in the bog where the peat was rich, thick and as dark as old Gerard’s face. She lifted the spade.

Stopped.

A flap of something leathery and brown like stained wood protruded from the earth, about a foot up on the wall of the ancient marsh. Elena crouched down, grunting with the unaccustomed bulk of her belly. She peered at the fold of leather, prodding it with the tip of her shovel to pull a little more out of the moss.

Elena gasped and dropped the shovel. Protruding from the appendage, squashed and compressed by the weight of centuries of peat, was a hand with four fingers, the tip of each finger a wide knob capped with a recessed claw. The shock sent Elena stepping backward. The shovel’s handle tangled between her legs, tripping her. She put her hands out instinctively to protect her stomach. She grunted with the impact, and the handle slammed against her knee. For a moment, she just lay there, taking inventory. The child jumped inside her, and she breathed again.

“Faika—” she began, but the shout came out entangled in the breath. She thought of how she must look, sprawled in the wet dirt and staring at the apparition in the peat, and laughed at herself.

“What a sight!” she told the child in her womb. “You’d think your mother was sure the boggin was going to get up and walk out of there,” she said. She stood, brushing uselessly at her stained trousers and grimacing with the bruised, protesting knee.

As she stood, she saw movement from the corner of her eye. A figure shifted in the small stand of globe-trees a hundred meters away. “Faika? Aldhelm?” Elena called, but the shadowy form—almost lost in tree-shadow—moved once more, and she knew it wasn’t either of the two. She could feel it, watching, staring at her. A grumbler? she thought, wondering if the rifle was still in the cart, but in the instant she glanced away to check the weapon, the shadow was gone.

There was no one there. The sense of being observed was gone.

Elena shivered, hugging herself. “Baby, your mother’s seeing ghosts now,” she said. She glanced back at the hand hanging from the peat. “I think I just saw your kami,” she told it. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything nasty to you. I’ll leave that to Anaïs. Knowing her, she’ll enjoy it.”

She took a deep breath, and looked again at the copse of trees. “Faika! Aldhelm!” Elena shouted. “If you two can stop fondling each other for a minute or so, I think you should come here and look at this.”

voice:

Anaïs Koda-Levin the Younger

“So...are you pregnant yet, Anaïs?”

I hate that question. I always have the wrong answer.

No. I’m not.

“Give it a rest, Ghost.”

“Everything’s still the same, is it? You are still trying, aren’t you? If we could only get you up here so we could see....”

I felt the old emotional garbage rising with Ghost’s questioning: the anger, the bitterness, the self-loathing. I forced the gorge down, packing the filth down behind that internal wall, but it was an effort. Our ancient steel surgical instruments, worn to a satin patina by over a century of use and constant sterilization, beat a raucous percussion on the tray I was holding. “Ghost—”

“Sorry, Anaïs. No need to get irritated. As the repository of Mictlan’s history...”

There are times when I wish I knew programming well enough to tone down Ghost’s assertiveness. “Shut up, Ghost.”

This time around, Ghost looked like an old blind man, hunched over an ornate glass cane that was as swirled and frosted as a Miccail stele. His sightless, ice-blue eyes stared somewhere past my right shoulder into the back corner of the coldroom lab. The outline of his body sparkled and flared disconcertingly, and his legs were implanted in the polished whitewood planking past his ankles.

“Ghost, Hui and I put a new floor in here since the last time. You look like you’re wading in wood, and it’s really disconcerting. Can you shift your image up about a dozen centimeters?”

“Oh, now that we’re on the subject of sex and reproduction, you want to change it? Anaïs, I know it’s no comfort to you, but if it were possible to reach the Ibn Battuta, a resonance scan or even an ultrasound would answer a lot of questions, and we could—”

“Drop it, Ghost. Drop it right now.”

This time, I made no effort to hide the anger. Ghost reminded me too much of the sympathy, the false reassurances given to me by my sibs, by my mam Maria. They look into my room and see my clothing draped carefully over the huge mirror (which had once belonged to Rebecca Koda-Levin herself), the shirts and pants arranged so that the mirror reflects nothing, and they don’t understand the significance of what they’re seeing.

The old man sighed. The image, sparking, raised up until the soles of his feet were almost even with the floor. “Better?”

“I’ll do.”

“You’re going to have to describe what you’re seeing,” Ghost said. “Since you’ve had the ill grace not to put a video feed in here.”

“Quit complaining.” My voice was muffled through the gauze mask I was tying behind my head, and my breath clouded in the cold air. “We put the feed in; the line was bad. No one’s had a chance to fix it yet—it’s not exactly high priority. Maybe next time.”

“But I’m curious now,” Ghost persisted. “I don’t have much time this orbit. Come on—you’re as slow as your Geema.”

I sniffed. A strand of hair had made an escape from the surgical cap; I brushed it out of my eyes. “Maybe that’s why they named me for her, huh?”

The retort was weak but it was the best I had at the moment. I turned back to the examination table and its strange contents. The bog body Elena had found lay there like a man-sized, crumpled bag of leather—which, in essence, it was. The acidic chemical stew of the peat had tanned and preserved the skin, but the skeletal structure and most of the interior organs had dissolved away. Over the last several days, in scraps of time between other, more pressing duties, I’d carefully cleaned away the worst of the peat clinging to the outside of the body, still hunched into its centuries-old fetal position. Now, like a gift, I was ready to unwrap the present given us by the bog.

Every time I’d looked at the body, I’d felt the same rush of adrenaline I felt now, a sense of standing in front of something...I don’t know...maybe sacred is the best word. Old and venerable, certainly. I was almost inclined to believe Elena’s tale about seeing a kami watching her when she’d found it.

After all, it was the bones of this race’s dead that had given rise to the name given to the planet: Mictlan, suggested by the lone Mexican crewmember of the Ibn Batutta. Mictlan was the Aztec land of the dead, where the god Quetzalcoatl found the bones of humankind—and now, where the bones of another dead culture had been found. The race itself were christened the Miccail—“the Dead,” in the Nahuatl language. In the years following, a few Miccailian burial sites had been explored. Not that the excavations told us much about the Miccail, since they cremated their dead before they buried the calcined and charred bones—a rite we’d borrowed from them for our own dead. The strange, whorled spires the Miccail had left behind on the northern continent, sticking out of Mictlan’s rocky soil like faerie cathedrals of dull glass and carved with images of themselves, had been photographed and documented; it was from these that we learned the most about the extinct race. More would have been done, probably, but the near destruction and crippling of the Ibn Battuta not six months after the colonists’ arrival and the resultant death of nearly all the crew members had suddenly, radically, and permanently shifted everyone’s priorities.

Basically, it was more important to scrape an existence from Mictlan than to try to decipher the mystery of our world’s previous inhabitants.

I suppose I could appreciate my ancestors’ sentiments. Priorities hadn’t changed much in the century since the accident. Survival was still far more important than any anthropological exploration. No one wanted Mictlan to harbor the scattered bones of two extinct, sentient races. I suppose we have the deliberate uncuriosity of the matriarchs and patriarchs to thank for our being here at all.

For one reason or another, though, I don’t seem to be much like them. In so many ways…

“Are you ready to record, Ghost?”

“I’d have much more to analyze with video.”

I waited. A moment later, Ghost sighed. The ancient’s body dissolved into static for a moment, then returned as a young woman in an Ibn Battuta officer’s uniform, though a fanciful, brightly-colored scarf was tied over her eyes like a blindfold. The voice changed also, from an elderly male quaver to a female soprano. “Recording into Ibn Battuta memory. Audio only log: 101 September 41. The voice is Anaïs Koda-Levin the Younger, Generation Six. Go ahead, Anaïs.”

I gave Ghost a sidewise look, swearing—as I had a few hundred times before—that I’d never understand why Gabriela had programmed her AI with such a quirky sense of humor and strange set of idiosyncrasies. “All right. This is another examination of the Miccail body found in the peat bog—and this will be very cursory, I’m afraid, since I’m on duty in the clinic tonight. Ghost, you can download my previous recordings from the Mictlan library.”

“It’s already done. Go on, Ana, you have my undivided attention.”

I knew that wasn’t true—there were still three other working projectors scattered among the compounds, and Ghost was no doubt talking with people at each of them at the moment, as well as performing the systems work necessary to keep our patchwork and shrinking network of century-old terminals together, but it was a nice lie. I shook my hair back from my eyes once more and leaned over the table.

Imagine someone unzipping his skin, crumpling it up, and throwing the discarded epidermis in a corner like an old suit—that’s what the corpse looked like. On its side, the body was drawn up like someone cowering in fear, the right arm folded around its back, the left thrown over the right shoulder like a shawl. The head was bowed down into the chest, crushed flat and turned to the left. I could see the closed lid of the right eye and the translucent covering of the central “eye” high on the forehead. A mane of dark, matted hair ran from the back of the bald, knobbed skull and halfway down the spine.

I gently pulled down the right leg, which was tucked up against the body. The skin moved grudgingly; I had to go slowly to avoid tearing it, moistening the skin occasionally with a sponge. Tedious work.

“Most of the body is intact,” I noted aloud after a while, figuring that Ghost was going to complain if I didn’t start talking soon. “From the spinal mane and the protrusions around the forehead, it’s one of the type Gabriela designated as ‘Nomads.’ If I recall correctly, she believed that since the carvings of Nomads disappear from the Miccail’s stelae in the late periods, these were a subspecies that went extinct a millennium or so before the rest of the Miccail.”

“You’ve been studying things you’ve been told to stay away from.”

“Guilty as charged. So that makes the body—what?—two thousand years old?”

“No later than that,” Ghost interrupted, “assuming Gabriela’s right about the stelae. We’ll have a better idea when we get the estimates from the peat samples and measurements. Máire’s still working on them.”

“Sounds fine. I’ll check with her in the next few days.”

I was lost in the examination now, seeing nothing but the ancient corpse in front of me. A distant part of me noted that my voice had gone deeper and more resonant, no longer consciously pitched high—we all have our little idiosyncrasies, I suppose. “Two thousand or more years old, then. The body evidently went naked into the lake that later became the bog—there’s no trace of any clothing. That may or may not be something unusual. The pictographs on the Miccail stelae show ornate costumes in daily use, on the Nomads as well as the rest, so it’s rather strange that this one’s naked....Maybe he was swimming? Anyway, we’re missing the left leg a half meter down from the hip and...”

The right leg, boneless and twisted, lay stretched on the table. Fragments of skin peeled from the stump of the ankle like bark from a whitewood. “...the right foot a few centimeters above the ankle. A pity—I’d like to have seen that central claw on the foot. Looks like the leg and foot decayed off the body sometime after it went into the lake. Wouldn’t be surprised if they turn up somewhere else later.”

I straightened the right arm carefully, laying it down on the table, moving slowly from shoulder to wrist. “Here’s one hand—four fingers, not five. Wonder if they counted in base eight? These are really long phalanges, though the meta-carpals must have been relatively short. The pads at the end of each digit still have vestiges of a recessed claw—would have been a nasty customer in a fight. There’s webbing almost halfway up the finger; bet they swam well. And this thumb...it’s highly opposed and much longer than a human’s. From the folds in the skin, I’d guess that it had an extra articulation, also.”

I grunted as I turned the body so that it rested mostly on its back. “There appears to be a large tattoo on the chest and stomach—blue-black lines. Looks like a pictogram of some sort, but there’s still a lot of peat obscuring it, and I’ll have to make sure that this isn’t some accidental postmortem marking of some kind. I’ll leave that for later…”

The remnant of the left leg was folded high up on the stomach, obscuring the tattoo. I lifted it carefully and moved it aside, revealing the groin. “Now that’s interesting…”

“What?” Ghost asked. “I’m a blind AI, remember?”

I exhaled under the surgical mask, resisting the urge to rise to Ghost’s baiting. “The genitalia. There’s a scaly, fleshy knob, rather high on the front pubis. I suppose that’s the penis analogue for the species, but it doesn’t look like normal erectile tissue or a penile sheath. No evidence of anything like testicles—no scrotal sac at all. Maybe they kept it inside.”

“They’re aliens, remember? Maybe they didn’t have one.”

I accepted Ghost’s criticism with a nod; She was right—I was lacing some heavy anthropomorphism into my speculations. “Maybe. There’s a youngpouch on the abdomen, though, and I haven’t seen any Mictlanian marsupialoids where both sexes had the pouch. Maybe in the Miccail both male and female suckled the young.” I lifted the leg, turning the body again with an effort. “There’s a urethra further down between the legs, and an anus about where you’d expect it—”

I stopped, dropping the leg I was holding. It fell to the table with a soft thud. I breathed. I could feel a flush climbing my neck, and my vision actually shivered for a moment, disorientingly.

“Anaïs?”

“It’s...” I licked suddenly dry lips. Frowned. “There’s what looks to be a vaginal opening just below the base of the spine, past the anus.”

“A hermaphrodite,” Ghost said, her voice suddenly flat. “Now there’s synchronicity for you, eh?”

I said nothing for several seconds. I was staring at the body, at the soft folds hiding the opening at the rear of the creature, not quite knowing whether to be angry. Trying to gather the shreds of composure. Staring at myself in the mirror, forcing myself to look only at that other Anaïs’s face, that contemplative, uncertain face lost in the fogged, spotted silver backing, and my gaze always, inevitably, drifting lower....

The Miccail body was an accusation, a mockery placed just for me by whatever gods ruled Mictlan.

“Gabriela speculated about the sexuality of the Nomads,” Ghost continued. “There were notes in her journals. She collected rubbings of some rather suggestive carvings on the Middle Period stelae. In fact, in a few cases she referred to the Nomads as ‘midmales’ because the stelae were ambiguous as to which they might be. It’s all scanned in the data-base—call it up.”

“I’ve read some of Gabriela’s journals—the public ones, anyway. Gabriela said a lot of strange things about the Miccail—and everything else on this world. Doesn’t make her right.”

“Give poor Gabriela a break. No one else was particularly interested in the Miccail after the accident. The first generation had more pressing problems than an extinct race. As an archeologist/anthropologist she was—just like you, I might add—a dilettante, a rank amateur.”

“And she was your lead programmer, right? That explains a lot about you.”

“It’s also why I’m still working. Ana, I’m running out of time here.”

“All right.”

I took another long breath, trying to find the objective, aloof Anaïs the bog body had banished. The leg had fallen so that the tattered end of the ankle hung over the edge of the table. I placed it carefully back into position and didn’t look at the trunk of the body or the mocking twinned genitals. Instead, I moved around the table, going to the Nomad’s head. Carefully, I started prying it from the folded position it had held for centuries.

“Looks like she...he…” I stopped. Ghost waited. My jaw was knotted; I forced myself to relax. Do this goddamn thing and get it over with. Put the body back in the freezer and forget about it. “She didn’t die of drowning. There’s a large wound on the back of the skull. Part crushing, part cutting like a blunt axe, and it probably came from behind. I’ll bet we’ll find that’s the cause of death, though I guess it’s possible she was thrown into the lake still alive. I’m moving the head back to its normal position now. Hey, what’s this...?”

I’d lifted the chin of the Miccail. Trapped deep in the folds of the neck was a thin, knotted cord, a garrote, pulled so tightly against the skin that I could see that the windpipe had closed under the pressure. “He was strangled as well.”

“He? I thought it was a she.”

I exhaled in exasperation. “Goddamn it, Ghost.. “

“Sorry,” Ghost apologized. She didn’t sound particularly sincere. “Axed, strangled, and drowned,” Ghost mused. “Wonder which happened first?”

“Somebody really wanted him dead. Poor thing.” I looked down at the flattened, peat-darkened features, telling myself that I was only trying to see in them some reflection of the Miccail’s mysterious life. This Miccail was a worse mirror than the one in my room. Between the pressure-distorted head and the long Miccail snout, the wide-set eyes, the light-sensitive eyelike organ at the top of the head, the nasal slits above the too-small, toothless mouth, it was difficult to attribute any human expression to the face. I sighed. “Let’s see if we can straighten out the other arm—”

“Ana,” Ghost interrupted, “you have company on the way, I’m afraid—”

“Anaïs!”

The shout came from outside, in the clinic’s lobby. A few seconds later, Elio Allen-Shimmura came through the lab doors in a burst. His dark hair was disheveled, his black eyes worried. The hair and eyes stood out harshly against his light skin, reddened slightly from the cold northwest wind. His plain, undistinguished features were furrowed, creasing the too-pale forehead under the shock of bangs and drawing the ugly, sharp planes of his face even tighter. He cast a glance at the bog body; I moved between Elio and the Miccail. Some part of me didn’t want him to see, didn’t want anyone to see.

Elio didn’t seem to notice. He glanced quickly to the glowing apparition of Ghost. “Is that you, Elio?” Ghost asked. “I can’t see through this damn blindfold.” Ghost grinned under the parti-colored blindfold.

Elio smiled in return, habitually, an expression that just touched the corners of his too-thin lips and died. “It’s me.” Something was bothering Elio; he couldn’t stand still, shuffling from foot to foot as if he were anxious to be somewhere else. I’d often noticed that reaction in my presence, but at least this time I didn’t seem to be the cause of it. Elio turned away from Ghost. “Anaïs, has Euzhan been in here?”

“Haven’t seen her, El.” Your Geeda Dominic doesn’t exactly encourage your Family’s children to be around me, I wanted to add, but didn’t. With my own Family having no children at the moment, if I had a favorite kid in the settlement, it would be Euzhan, a giggling, mischievous presence. Euzhan liked me, liked me with the uncomplicated trust of a child; liked me—I have to admit—with the same unconscious grace that her mother had possessed. It was impossible not to love the child back. I began to feel a sour stirring in the pit of my stomach.

“Damn! I was hoping...” Elio’s gaze went to the door, flicking away from me.

“El, what’s going on?”

He spoke to the air somewhere between Ghost and me. “It’s probably nothing. Euz is missing from the compound, has been for an hour. Dominic’s pretty frantic. We’ll probably find her hiding in the new building, but.. “

I could hear the forced nonchalance in Elio’s voice; that told me that they’d already checked the obvious places where a small child might hide. A missing child, in a population as small as ours, was certainly cause for immediate concern—Dominic, the current patriarch of the Allen-Shimmura family, would have sent out every available person to look for the girl. Elio frowned and shook his head. “All right. You’re in the middle of something, I know. But if you do see her—”

His obvious distress sparked guilt. “This has waited for a few thousand years. It can certainly wait another hour or two. I’ll come help. Just give me a few minutes to put things away and scrub.”

“Thanks. We appreciate it.” Elio glanced again at the Miccail’s body, still eclipsed behind me, then gave me a small smile before he left. I was almost startled by that and returned the smile, forgetting that he couldn’t see it behind the mask. As he left, I slid the examining table back into the isolation compartment, then went to the sink and began scrubbing the protective brownish covering of thorn-vine sap from my hands.

“A bit of interest there?” Ghost ventured.

“You’re blind, remember?”

“Only visually. I’m getting excellent audio from your terminal. Let me play it back—you’ll hear how your voice perked up—”

“Elio’s always been friendly enough to me, that’s all. I’m not interested; he’s definitely not, or he hides it awfully well. Besides, El is...” Ugly, I almost said, and realized how that would sound, coming from me. His eyes are nice, and his hands. But his face—the eyes are set too close together, his nose is too long and the mouth too large. His skin is a patchwork of blotches. And the one time we tried...“At least he doesn’t look at me like...like...” I hated the way I sounded, hated the fact that I knew Ghost was recording it all. I hugged myself, biting my lower lip. “Look, I really don’t want to talk about this.”

Ghost flickered. Her face morphed into lines familiar from holos of the Matriarchs: Gabriela. “Making sense of an attraction is like analyzing chocolate. Just enjoy it, and to hell with the calories.” The voice was Gabriela’s, too: smoky, husky, almost as low as mine.

“You’re quoting.”

“And you’re evading.” A line of fire-edged darkness sputtered down Ghost’s figure from head to foot as the image began to break up. “Doesn’t matter—I’m also drifting out of range. See you in three days this time. I should have a longer window then. Make sure you document everything about the Miccail body.”

“I will. You get me those age estimates from Máire’s uploads when you can.”

“Promise.” Static chattered in Ghost’s voice; miniature lightning storms crackled across her body. She disappeared, then returned, translucent. I could see the murdered Nomad’s body through her. “Go help Elio find Euzhan.”

“I will. Take care up there, Ghost.”

A flash of light rolled through Ghost’s image. She went two-dimensional and vanished utterly.

context:

Bui Allen-Shimmura

“Bui, Geeda Dominic wants you. Now.” Bui felt his skin prickle in response, like spiders scurrying up his spine. He straightened up, closing the vegetable bin door. Euzhan wasn’t there, wasn’t in any of her usual hiding places. Bui looked at Micah’s lopsided face, and could see that there was no good news there. He asked anyway. “Did anyone find her?”

Micah shook his head, his lips tight. “Not yet,’ he answered, his voice blurred with his cleft palate. “Geeda’s sent Elio out to alert the other Families and get them to help search.”

“Khudda.” Bui didn’t care that da Micah heard him cursing. The way Bui figured it, he couldn’t get into any more trouble than he was already in. If he found Euzhan now, he might just kill the girl for slipping away while he was responsible for watching her. It wasn’t fair. He’d be ten in half a year. At his age, he should have been out working the fields with the rest, not babysitting.

“How’s Geeda?” he asked Micah.

“In as foul a mood as I’ve ever seen. You’d better get up there fast, boy.”

Bui’s shoulders sagged. He almost started to cry, sniffing and wiping his nose on his sleeve. “Go on,” Micah told him. “Get it over with.”

He went.

Geeda Dominic was in the common room of the Allen-Shimmura compound, staring out from the window laser-chiseled from the stone of the Rock. A dusty sunbeam threw Dominic’s shadow on the opposite wall. Bui noticed immediately that no one else from the Family was in the room. That didn’t bode well, since the others sometimes managed to keep Dominic’s infamous temper in check. “Geeda?” Bui said tremulously. “Micah said you—”

Dominic was the eldest of the Allen-Shimmura family, a venerable eighty, but he turned now with a youth born of anger. His cane, carved by the patriarch Shigetomo himself, with a knobbed head of oak all the way from Earth, slashed air and slammed into Bui’s upper arm. Surprise and pain made Bui cry out, and the blow was hard enough to send him sprawling on the rug.

“Hakuchi!” Dominic shouted at him, the cane waving in Bui’s face like a club. “You fool!”

Bui clutched his arm, crying openly now. “Geeda, it wasn’t my fault. Hizo, he’d fallen and skinned his knees, and when I finished with him, Euzhan—”

“Shut up!” The cane whoomped as it slashed in front of his face. “You listen to me, boy. If Euzhan is hurt or...or...” Bui knew the word that Dominic wouldn’t say. Dead. Fear reverberated in Bui’s head, throbbing in aching syncopation with the pain in his arm. “You better hope they find her safe, boy, or I’ll have you goddamn shunned. I swear I will. No one will talk to you again. You’ll be cast out of the Family. You’ll find your own food or you’ll starve.”

“No, Geeda, please...” Bui shivered.

“Get out of here,” Dominic roared. His hand tightened around the shaft of his cane, trembling. “Get out of here and find her. Don’t bother coming back until you do. You understand me, boy?”

“Yes, Geeda Dominic. I’m...I’m sorry...I’m awful sorry...” Bui, still sobbing, half crawled, half ran from the room.

Dominic’s cane clattered against the archway behind Bui as he went through.

voice:

Anaïs Koda-Levin the Younger

“Euzhan! Damn, it, child....” I exhaled in frustration, my voice hoarse
from calling. Elio sagged tiredly near me. He rubbed the glossy stock of his rifle with fingers that seemed almost angry. “It’s getting dark,” he said. “It’s near SixthHour. She’ll come out from wherever she’s hiding as soon as she notices. She always wants the light on in the creche, and she’ll be getting hungry by now. She’ll be out. I know it.”

Elio wasn’t convincing even himself. There was a quick desperation in his voice. I understood it all too well. All of us did. Our short history’s full of testimonials to this world’s whims—as our resident historian, Elio probably understood that better than I did.

Mictlan had not been a kind world for the survivors of Ibn Batutta. Two colonies—one on each of Mictlan’s two continents—had been left behind after the accident that had destroyed most of the mothership. The colonies quickly lost touch with each other when a massive, powerful hurricane raked the southern colony’s continent in the first year of exile, and they never resumed radio contact with us or with Ghost on the Ibn Battuta.

Another storm had nearly obliterated our northern colony in Year 23, killing six of the original nine crewmembers here. I suppose that was our historical watershed, since that disaster inalterably changed the societal structure, giving rise to what became the Families. Local diseases mutated to attack our strange new host bodies, stalking the children especially—the Bloody Cough alone killed two children in five by the time they reached puberty. I know: I see the bodies and do the autopsies. There are the toothworms or the tree-leapers or the grumblers; there are the bogs and the storms and the bitter winters; there are accidents and infections and far, far too many congenital defects. Most of them are bad enough that nature itself takes care of them: miscarriages, stillbirths, nonviable babies who are born and die within a few days or a few months—which is why none of the Families will name a child before his or her first birthday. I also know the others—the ones who lived but who are marked with the stamp of Mictlan.

I knew them very well.

The rate of viable live births—for whatever reason: a side effect of the LongSleep, or some unknown factor in the Mictlan environment—was significantly lower among the ship members and their descendants than for the general population of Earth. Just over a century after being stranded on Mictlan, our human population nearly matched the year; there’d been no growth for the last quarter of a century. Too many years, deaths outnumbered births.

Mictlan was not a sweet, loving Motherworld. She was unsympathetic and unremittingly harsh.

I knew that Elio’s imagination was calculating the same dismal odds mine was. This was no longer just a child hiding away from her mi or da, not this late, not this long.

Euzhan was four. I’d seen the girl in the clinic just a few days ago—an eager child, still awkward and lisping, and utterly charming. Ochiba, Euzhan’s mother, had once been my best—hell, one of my only—friends. What we’d had....

Anyway, Euzhan had been a difficult birth, a breech baby. All of Ochiba’s births were difficult; her pelvis was narrow, barely wide enough to accommodate a baby’s head. On Earth, she would have been an automatic cesarean, but not here, not when any major operation is an open invitation for some postoperative infection. I could have gone in. Ochiba told me she’d go with whatever I decided. Ochiba had delivered three children before—with long, difficult labors, each time. I made the decision to let her go, and she—finally—delivered twelve hours later.

But Ochiba’s exhaustion after the long labor gave an opportunistic respiratory virus its chance—Ochiba died three days after Euzhan’s birth on 97 LastDay. Neither Hui Koda-Schmidt, the colony’s other “doctor,” nor I had been able to break the raging fever or stop the creeping muscular paralysis that followed. Our medical database is quite extensive, but is entirely Earth-based. On Mictlan-specific diseases, there’s only the information that we colonists have entered, and I was all too familiar with that. Ghost had been out of touch, the Ibn Battuta’s unsynchronized orbit trapping the AI on the far side of Mictlan. I don’t have the words to convey the utter helpless impotence I’d felt, watching Ochiba slowly succumb, knowing that I was losing someone I loved.

Knowing that maybe, just maybe, my decision had been the reason she died.

I’d been holding Ochiba’s hand at the end. I cried along with her Family, and Dominic—grudgingly—had even asked me to speak for Ochiba at her Burning.

A damn small consolation.

Euzhan, Ochiba’s third named child, was especially precious to Dominic, the head of Family Allen-Shimmura. Euz was normal and healthy. As we all knew too well, any child was precious, but one such as Euzhan was priceless. The growing fear that something tragic had happened to Euzhan was a black weight on my soul.

“Who was watching Euz?”

“Bui,” Elio answered. “Poor kid. Dominic’ll have him skinned alive if Euz is hurt.”

Nearly all of the Allen-Shimmura family were out searching for Euzhan now, along with many from the other Families. The buildings were being scoured one more time; a large party had gone into the cultivated fields to the south-east of the compound and were prowling the rows of white-bean stalks and scarlet faux-wheat. Elio and I had gone out along the edge of Tlilipan. I’d been half-afraid we’d see Euzhan’s tiny footprints pressed in the mud flats along the pond’s shore, but there’d been nothing but the cloverleaf tracks of skimmers. That didn’t mean that Euzhan hadn’t fallen into one of the patches of wet marsh between the colony and Tlilipan, or that a prowling grumbler hadn’t come across her unconscious body and dragged her off, still half- alive, to a rocky lair along the river....

I forced the thoughts away. I shivered under my sweater and shrugged the strap of the medical kit higher on my shoulder. I’ve never been particularly religious, but I found myself praying to whatever kami happened to be watching.

Just let her be all right Let her come toddling out of some forgotten hole in the compound, scared and dirty, but unharmed.

The sun was prowling the tops of the low western hills, the river trees painting long, grotesque shadows which rippled over the bluefern-pocked marshland. Not far away was the pit where we’d dug the Miccail body from the peat. Behind the trees, the chill breeze brought the thin, faint sound of voices from below the Rock, calling for Euzhan. I turned to look, squinting back up the rutted dirt road. There, a tall blackness loomed against the sky: the Rock. The first generation had carved a labyrinth of tunnels in the monolithic hill of bare stone perched alongside the river; from the various openings, we’d added structures that poked out like wood, steel, and glass growths on the stone, so that the Families lived half in and half out of the granite crag. Now, in its darkness, the familiar lights of the Family compounds glistened.

The Rock. Home to all of us.

“Let’s keep looking,” I told Elio. “We still have time before it gets too dark.”

Elio nodded. Where his light skin met the dark cloth of his shirt there was a knife-sharp contrast that stood out even in the dusk. “Fine. We should spread out a bit....”

Elio looked so forlorn that I found myself wanting to move closer to him, to hug him. As much as I might have denied it to Ghost, the truth was that Elio was someone I genuinely liked. Maybe it was because he was so plain, with that pale, blotchy skin, his off-center mouth and wide nose, and his gawky, nervous presence. Elio was not one of the popular men, not one of those who spend every possible night in some woman’s room, but we talked well, and I liked the way he walked and the fact that one side of his mouth went higher than the other when he smiled. I liked the warmth in his voice.

He was tapping the rifle stock angrily, staring out into the marsh. I touched his arm; he jerked away. Under the deep ridges of his brows, his black eyes glinted. I could read nothing in them, couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “Let’s go find Euz,’ I said.

The light had slid into a deep gold, almost liquid. The sun was half lost behind slopes gone black with shadow. If we were going to continue searching, we’d have to go back soon for lights. Elio and I moved slowly around the marsh’s edge, calling Euz’s name and peering under the low-hanging limbs of the amberdrop trees, brushing aside the sticky, purplish leaves. Darkness crept slowly over the landscape, the temperature dropping as rapidly as the sun. The marsh steamed in the cooling air, the evening fog already cloud-thick near the river. Our breaths formed small thunderheads before us. Neither of the moons—the brooding Longago or its smaller, fleeter companion Faraway—were up yet. At the zenith, the stars were hard, bright points set in satin, though a faint trace of deep blue lingered at the horizon. Near the compound, outside the fences, someone had lit a large bonfire; the breeze brought the scent of smoke.

“El? It’s way past SixthHour, and it’s getting too dark to see....”

“All right,” Elio sighed. “I guess we might as well—”

Before he could finish, a grumbler’s basso growl shivered the evening quiet, sinister and low. “Over there,” I whispered, pointing. Elio unslung the rifle. “Come on.”

I moved out into the wet ground, and Elio followed.

The grumblers were scavengers, nearly two meters in height, looking like a cut-and-paste, two-legged hybrid of great ape and Komodo dragon, though—like the Miccail and several other local species—they were probably biologically closer to an Earth marsupial than anything else. They walked upright if stooped over, their clawed front hands pulled close, slinking through the night. They were rarely seen near our settlement, seeming to fear the presence of the noisy humans. Sometimes alone, sometimes running in a small pack, they were also generally quiet—hearing one meant that the creature was close, and that it had found something. Grumblers were thieves and scavengers, snatching the kills of other, smaller predators or pouncing on an unsuspecting animal if it looked tiny and helpless enough. I hated them: they were ugly, cowardly, and mean beasts. They invariably ran if challenged.

If one had crept this close to the compound, then it had spotted something worth the danger to itself. Elio and I ran.

The grumbler was leaning over something in a small hollow, still mewling in its bass voice. Hearing us approach, it stood upright, turning its furred snout toward us and ex-posing double rows of needled teeth. The twinned tongue that was common in Mictlanian wildlife slithered in the mouth. Straggling fur swung under its chin like dreadlocks. Shorter fur cradled the socket of the central lens—like that of the Miccail—placed high in the forehead. The grumbler glared and cocked its head as if appraising us.

It growled. I couldn’t see what it had been crouching over, but the grumbler appeared decidedly irritated at having been disturbed. The long, thin arms sliced the air in our direction, the curved slashing claws on the fingers extended. They looked sharper and longer than I remembered.

“Shoo!” I shouted. “Get out of here!” I waved my arms at it The few times I’d met grumblers before, that had been enough; they’d skulked away like scolded children.

This one didn’t move. It growled again, and it took a step toward us.

“Hey—” Elio said behind me. He fired the rifle into the air once. The percussive report echoed over the marsh, deafening. The grumbler jumped backward, crouching, but it held its ground. It snarled now, and took a step forward. I waved at it again.

“Ana...” Elio said warningly.

The grumbler gave him no time to say more.

It leaped toward me.

Improvisation, my great-grandmother Anaïs has often told me, is not just for musicians. Of course, Geema Ana usually says that when she’s decided to use coarse red thread rather than thin white in the pattern she’s weaving. I don’t think she had situations like this in mind. Or maybe she did, since she was talking about using the materials at hand for your task. For the first time in my life, I demonstrated that I had that skill: I swung my medical bag.

The heavy leather hit the creature in the side of the head and sent it reeling down into the marsh on all fours. The bag broke open, the strap tearing as the contents tumbled out. Shaking its ugly head, the dreadlocks caked with mud, the grumbler snarled and hissed. It gathered itself to leap again. I doubted that the now-empty bag was going to stop it a second time, and I had the feeling that I’d pretty much exhausted my improvisational repertoire.

Elio fired from his hip, with no time to aim. A jagged line of small scarlet craters appeared on the grumbler’s muscular chest, and it shrieked, twisting in midair. The grumbler collapsed on the ground in front of me, still slashing with its claws and snapping.

Elio brought the rifle to his shoulder, aimed carefully between the eyes that glared at him in defiance, and pulled the trigger.

The grumbler twitched once and lay still. Its eyes were still open, staring at death with a decided fury.

“What was that all about?” I said. I could hardly hear over the sound of blood pounding in my head.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen one do that before.” Elio still hadn’t lowered the rifle, as if he were waiting for the grumbler to move again. His face was paler than usual, with a prominent red flush on the cheeks. I could see something dark huddled on the ground where the grumbler had been.

“Elio! There she is!”

I ran.

Euzhan was unconscious, lying on her back. “Oh, God,” Elio whispered. I knew he was staring at the girl’s blouse—it was torn, and blood darkened the cloth just above the navel. I knelt beside her and gently pulled up the shirt.

The grumbler’s claws had laid Euzhan open. The gash was long and deep, exposing the fatty tissue and tearing into muscles, though thankfully it looked like the abdominal wall was intact. “Damn...” I muttered; then, for Elio’s benefit: “It looks worse than it is.” Euzhan had lost blood; it pooled dark and thick under her, but the wound was seeping rather than pulsing—no arterial loss. I allowed myself a quick sigh of relief: we could get her back to the clinic, then. Still, she’d lost a lot of blood, and the unconsciousness worried me.

I quickly probed the rest of body, checked the limbs, felt under the head. There was a swelling bump on the back of her skull, but other than that and the grumbler’s wound, Euzhan appeared unharmed. As I tucked the girl’s blouse back down, her eyes fluttered open. “Anaïs? Elio? I’m awful cold,” Euzhan said sleepily. I smiled at her and stroked her cheek.

“I’m sure you are, love. Here, Anaïs has a sweater you can wear until we get you back.” Euzhan nodded, then her eyes closed again. “Euzhan,” I said quietly but firmly. “Euz, no sleeping now, love. I need you to stay awake and talk to me. Do you understand?”

Long eyelashes lifted slightly. Her breath deepened. “Am I going to die, Ana?”

I could barely answer through the sudden constriction in my throat. “No, honey. You’re not going to die. I promise. You lay there very still now, and keep those pretty eyes open. I need to talk to your da a second.”

“I think we found her in time,” I told Elio, covering Euzhan in my sweater. “But we need to move quickly. We have to get her back to the clinic where I can work on her. What I’ve got in the kit isn’t going to do it. Go get us some help. We’ll need a stretcher.”

Elio didn’t move. He stood there, staring down at Euzhan, his eyes wide with worry and fear. I prodded him. “I need you to go now, El. Don’t worry—she’ll be fine.”

That shook him out of his stasis. Elio nodded and broke into a run, calling back to the settlement as he ran.

She’ll be fine, I’d promised him.

I hoped I was going to be right.

context:

Faika Koda-Shimmura

“They found Euzhan, Geema Tozo.” Faika was still breathing hard from the exertion of climbing the stairs to Geema’s loft in the tower. Faika, who’d been part of those searching near the old landing pad, had been with the group that helped bring Euzhan bade to the Rock. She was still buzzing from the excitement.

Tozo lifted her head from the fragrant incense burning in an ornate holder set on top of a small Miccail stele Tozo used as an altar, but she didn’t turn toward Faika. She kept her hands folded together in meditation, her breathing calm and centered, a distinct contrast to Faika’s gasping. Several polished stones were set around the base of the stele. Tozo reached out and touched them, each in turn. “I know,” she said. “I felt it. She’s hurt but alive.”

Geema Togo’s tone indicated that her words were more statement than question. But then Tozo always said that she actually talked with the kami that lived around the Rock. There were others who were devout, but Tozo lived Njia—The Way—as no one else did; at least it seemed so to Faika’s somewhat prejudiced eyes. Faika was sure that when the current Kiria, Tami, chose a replacement this coming LastDay, Tozo would be the next Kiria. Faika was a little disappointed that her news wasn’t quite the bombshell she’d hoped, but she was also proud that her Geema could know it, just from listening to the voices in her head.

“They took her to the clinic?” Tozo asked. She turned finally. Her face was a network of fine wrinkles, like a piece of paper folded over and over, and the eyes were the brown of nuts in the late fall. Both her hands (and her feet, as Faika knew from seeing Tozo in the Baths) were webbed with a thin sheath of pink skin between the fingers, and the lower half of her face was squeezed together in a faint suggestion of a snout. Faika thought Tozo looked like some ancient and beautiful aquatic animal.

“Hai,” Faika answered. “Anaïs and Elio found her, and Anaïs was taking care of her. There was a lot of blood. A grumbler—”

“I know,” Geema Tozo said, and Faika nodded. The incense hissed and sputtered behind Tozo, and she closed her eyes briefly. “There’s trouble coming, Faika. I can feel it. The kami, the old ones, are stirring. Anaïs...” Tozo sighed.

“Come help me up, child,” she said to Faika, extending her hand. “Let’s go downstairs. I can smell Giosha’s dinner even through the incense, and my stomach’s rumbling. What’s done is done, and we can’t change it.”

interlude:

KaiSa

KaiSa stood on the bluff that overlooked the sea. As Kai expected, BieTe was there: the Old-Father for the local settlement. He was squatting in front of the nasituda, (See Appendix ‘A’ for a detailed glossary of terms ) the Telling Stone. In one hand he held a bronze drill, in the other was the chipped bulk of his favorite hammerstone. The salt-laden wind ruffled his hair. The sound of his carving was loud in the morning stillness, each note brilliant and distinct against the rhythmic background of surf, separated by a moment of aching silence and anticipation: T-ching. T-ching. T-ching. Bie was wearing his ceremonial red robes: the shangaa. Flakes of the translucent pale crystal of the stone had settled in his lap, like spring petals on a field of blood.

Bie must have heard Kai’s approach, but he gave no sign. KaiSa sniffed the air, fragrant with brine and crisp with die promise of new snow, and opened ker mouth wide to taste all the glorious scents. “The wind is calling the new season, OldFather,” ke said. “Can’t you hear it?”

Bie grimaced He snorted once and bared the hard-ridged gums of his mouth in a wide negative without turning around. T-ching. T-ching. “I hear—” T-ching. “—nothing.”

Bie put down the hammerstone. He blew across the carving so that milky rock powder curled into the breeze and away. He stood, lifted his shangaa above the hips and carefully urinated on the column. Afterward, he wiped away the excess with the robe’s hem to join the multitude of other stains there, a ceremonial three strokes of the cloth: for earth, for air, for water. Where Bie’s urine had splashed onto the newly-carved surface, the almost colorless rock slowly darkened to a vivid yellow-orange, highlighting the new figures and matching the other carvings on the stele, while the weathered, oxidized surface of the Telling Stone remained frosty white. Kai could read the hieroglyphic, pictorial writing: the glyph of the OldFather, the wavy line that indicated birth, the glyph of other-self, the slash that made the second figure a diminutive, and the dark circle of femininity.

I, BieTe, declare here that a new female child has been born.

“I decided to take a walk after the birth,” Kai said. “Has MasTa named the child?”

“I’ve not heard her name. Mas said that VeiSaTi hasn’t spoken it yet.”

Where there should have been joy, there was instead a hue of sullenness in Bie’s voice, and Kai knew that ke was the cause of it. Kai nodded. “Mas will give the child strength.” Then, because ke knew that it would prick the aloofness that Bie had gathered around himself, ke added: “Mas is a delight, very beautiful and very wise. We’re both lucky to enjoy her love.”

Kai could see Bie’s throat pulse at that. “I know what you’re thinking,” Bie said. “I know why you came to find me. You’re telling me you want to go.” Bie’s gaze, as brown as the stones of the sea-bluff, drifted away from Kai down to the surging waves, then back. “But I don’t want you to leave.”

Kai knew this was coming, though ke had hoped that this time it would be different, that for once ker love and affection might emerge unmarred and free of the memory of anger or violence. But—as with most times before—ker wish would not be granted. Kai’s mentor JaqSaTu had warned ker of this years ago, when Kai was still bright with the optimism of the newly initiated.

Jaq handed Kai a paglanut and closed ker fingers around the thin, chitinous shell “Each time, you will think your hands have been filled with joy, but you will be wrong.” Jaq told ker. Ke increased the pressure on Kai’s fingers, until the ripe nut had broken open. The scent of corruption filled Kai’s nostrils—all but one small kernel of the nut was rotten. Jaq plucked the good kernel from the mess in Kai’s hand and held it in front of ker. “You will learn to find the nourishment among the rot, or you will starve.”

Kai looked at the weathered, handsome face of Bie Old-Father, at the creased, folded lines ke had caressed and licked in the heat of lovemaking, and ke saw that Bie’s love had hardened and grown brittle.

“I’m only a servant of VeiSaTi,” Kai answered softly and hopelessly. “BieTe, please, you don’t want to anger a god. I love you. My time here has been wonderful and for that I wish I could stay, but I have my duty.” Kai indicated ker own shangaa, dyed bright yellow from the juices of pagla root: VeiSaTi’s favored plant, that the god had spewed upon the earth so that all could eat. “Mas has her child. HajXa and CerXa will deliver soon. I have given your people all that a Sa can.”

A cloud, driven fast by the high wind, cloaked the sun for a moment before passing. The brais, the Sun’s Eye high on their foreheads, registered the quick shift in light and both of them crouched instinctively as if ready to flee from a diving wingclaw. Kai watched the scudding clouds pass overhead for a few seconds, then glanced back at Bie. His face was as hard as the Telling Stone, as unyielding as the bronze drill he’d used to carve it. “You should not leave yet,” he said. “Tonight, we will give thanks to VeiSaTi for the new child. You must be here for the ceremony.”

“And then I may go?”

BieTe didn’t answer. He was staring at the Telling Stone, and whatever he was thinking was hidden. He picked up the hammerstone from the ground and hefted it in his hand. “You’ll walk back with me now,” he said.

There didn’t seem to be an answer to that.

BieTe left Kai almost as soon as they reached the village, going off to examine the pagla fields. His mood had not improved during their walk, and Kai was glad to be left alone. Ke went into the TaTe dwelling. “MasTa?” ke called softly.

“In here, Kai.”

Kai slid behind the curtain that screened the sleeping quarters. “I’m so happy for you,” ke said. “May...may I see?”

MasTa smiled at Kai. Almost shyly, she unfastened the closures of her shangaa, exposing her body. Sliding a hand down her abdomen, she opened the muscular lip of her youngpouch and let Kai peer inside. The infant, eyes still closed and entirely hairless, not much longer than Kai’s hand, was curled at the bottom of the snug pocket of Mas’s flesh. Her mouth was fastened on one of Mas’s nipples, and her sides heaved in the rapid breath of the newborn as she suckled. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Mas whispered.

Kai reached into the warm youngpouch and stroked the child gently, enjoying the shiver ker daughter gave as ke touched her. “Yes,” ke sighed. “She’s beautiful, yes.” Reluctantly, ke took ker hand from the pouch and stroked Mas’s cheek with fingers still fragrant and moist from the infant. Ke fondled the tight, red-gold curls down her neck. “After all, she’s yours.”

Mas laughed at that. She let the youngpouch close, fastened her shangaa again, and reclined on the pillows supporting her back.

“Tired?” Kai asked.

“A little.”

“Then rest. I’ll leave you alone to sleep.”

“No, Kai,” Mas said. “Please.”

“All right.” Kai settled back into the nest of pillows piled in the sleeping room. For what seemed a long time, ke simply watched Mas, enjoying the way the sunlight burned in her hair and burnished the pattern of her skin as it came through the open window of the residence. As ke gazed at her, ke could feel that part of ker did indeed want to stay, to watch this child of kers and Mas and Bie grow, to see her weaned from the pouch when the weather turned warm again, to listen to her first words and watch the reflection of kerself in the new child’s eyes. Mas must have guessed what ke was thinking, for she spoke from her repose, her eyes closed against the sun.

“I know that you must leave. I understand.”

“I’m glad someone does.” Kai said it as unharshly as ke could.

Her large eyes opened, that surprising flecked blue-green that was so rare and so striking. A knitted covering tied around her head shielded her brais from the afternoon glare. “Bei loves you as much as I do. Maybe more. He told me once that you have made him feel whole. He’s afraid, Kai That’s all. He’s afraid that when you leave, you’ll take part of him with you.”

“I’m leaving behind far more of myself than I’m taking,” Kai answered. Ke stroked ker own belly for emphasis. “I’m leaving behind your child, and Haj and Cer’s. I’ve given you VieSaTi’s gift. Now I must give it to others.”

“Why?” Mas asked. Her bright, colorful eyes searched ker face.

“Now you sound like BieTe,” Kai said, and softened ker words with a laugh. “I’m a Sa. I’ve been taught the ways of the Sa. After I leave, other Sa will come here.”

“And if they don’t?”

“You’ll still have children,” Kai said, answering the question ke knew was hidden behind her words. “With BieTe alone.”

“I had three other children before you came,” Mas said. “Only one lived, a male. Bie sent him away.” Mas averted her eyes, not looking at Kai, and her skin went pale with sadness. Kai’s own brown arms whitened in sympathy. “The others...well, my first one lived only a season. The other, a female, was wild and strange. She never learned to talk, and she was fey. She would attack me when I was sleeping, or kill the little meatfurs just to watch them die. A wingclaw took her finally, or that’s what BieTe told me. I...I found it hard to mourn.”

“Mas—” Kai leaned forward to hold Mas, but she bared her gums.

“Don’t,” Mas said. “Don’t, because you’ll only make me miss you more. You’ll only make it harder.” Mas brought her legs up. Arms around knees, she hugged herself, as if she was cold. “The sun’s almost down. Bie will be starting the ceremony soon. I need to sleep, so I’ll be ready.”

“I understand,” Kai said....the smell of the rotten paglanut, breaking in ker hand...“I understand. I...I’ll see you then.”

Reaching forward, ke patted the youngpouch through her shangaa. “Sleep for a bit. Rest.” Ke rose and went to the door of the chamber. Stopping there, ke looked back at her, at the way she watched ker.

“I love you, MasTa,” ke said.

She didn’t smile. “I love you also,” she said. “But I wish I didn’t.”

voice:

Anaïs Koda-Levin the Younger

“Clean Euzhan up and get her into a bed,” I told our assistants. “She should be waking up in about ten minutes or so—let Hui or me know if she isn’t responding. Hayat, we’re going to need more whole blood, so after you get Euzhan comfortable, round up three or four of her mi, da, or sibs and get some. Ama, if you’d take charge of the cleanup....”

As they rolled Euzhan away to one of the clinic rooms, I went to the sink and scrubbed the blood and thorn-vine sap from my hands. Hui shuffled alongside me, using the other spigot. When I’d finished drying, I leaned back against the cool wall, frowning through the weariness. Hui shook water from his hands, toweled dry, and tossed the towel in the hamper as I watched his slow, deliberate motions.

I knew what he was going to say before he said it. We’d been working together for that long.

“You did what you could, Anaïs. Now we wait and see.” Hui stretched out one ancient forefinger and tapped me gently under the chin. “We can’t do anything else for her right now.”

“Hui, you saw how close that was.” I shivered at the memory. “The descending oblique was nearly severed. If those claws had dug in a few millimeters deeper...”

“But they didn’t, and Euzhan will fight off infections or she won’t, and we’ll do what we need to do, whatever happens. Ana, what did I tell you when you first started studying with me?”

That finally coaxed a wan, grudging smile through the fog of exhaustion. “Let’s see...‘Is that expression normal for you, child, or does catatonia run in your family?’ Or how about: ‘I’m afraid to let you handle a broom, much less a scalpel’ Oh, and I couldn’t forget: I’m sure you have some qualities, or they wouldn’t have sent you to me. Let’s hope we manage to stumble across them before you kill someone.’” I shrugged. “Those were some of the milder quotes that I can recall. I was sure you were going to send me home and tell my family that I was hopeless.”

Hui snorted. The wrinkles around his almond eyes pressed deeper as he grinned. “I very nearly did. You have a good memory, Anaïs, but a selective one. You’ve forgotten the one important thing.”

“And what was that?”

I could see myself in his dark eyes. I could also see the filmy white of the cataracts that were slowly and irrevocably destroying his vision. Not that Hui would ever complain or even admit it, though I’d noticed—silently—that he’d passed nearly all the surgery to me in the past year. “I once told you that no matter how good you were, you are only a tool in the hands of whatever kami inhabits this place. You’re a very good tool, Anaïs, and you have done all the work that you’re capable of doing for the moment. Be satisfied. Besides, it’s no longer you that I’m hounding; it’s Hayat and Ama.” His forefinger tucked me under my chin once more. “Come on, child.”

“I’m not a child, Hui.”

“No, you’re not. But I still get to call you that. Come on. Dominic will be going apoplectic by now, and we can’t afford that at his age.”

Hui was right about that. As we came through the doors into the clinic’s waiting room, half of the Allen-Shimmura family surged forward toward us, with patriarch Dominic at the fore. I avoided him and tried to give a reassuring smile to Andrea and Hizo, Ochiba’s other two children, both of them standing close behind the bulwark of Dominic.

“Well?” the old man snapped. He was as thin as a thorn-vine stalk, and as prickly. His narrow lips were surrounded by furrows, his black, almost pupilless eyes were overhung by folds. His voice had gone to wavering with his great age, but was no less edged for that. The grandson of Rebecca Allen, he was one of the few people left of the third generation. My Geema Anaïs once described Dominic as being like a strip of preserved meat: too salty and dry to decay, and too tough to be worth chewing. “How is she?”

I noticed immediately that Dominic was looking at Hui rather than me, even though the patriarch was aware that I had been in charge of the surgery.

Hui noticed it as well. He was wearing what I thought of as his “go ahead and make your mistake” face, the expressionless and noncommittal mask he wore when one of his students would look up quizzically while making an incision. Hui leaned against the wall and folded his arms over his chest. “Anaïs did the surgery. All I did was assist.” He said nothing more. The silence stretched for several seconds before Dominic finally sniffed, glared at Hui angrily, and turned his sour gaze on me.

“Well?” he snapped once more.

“Euzhan’s fine for the moment.” I found it easier, after the first few words, to put my regard elsewhere. I let my gaze wander, making eye contact with Euzhan’s mi and da, and favoring Elio with a transient smile. ‘’We cleaned up the wound—nothing vital was injured, but we had to repair more muscle damage than I like. She’s going to need therapy afterward, but we’ll work out some schedule for that later. Actually, she should be waking up in a few minutes. She’s going to be groggy and in some pain—Hui’s already prepared painkillers for her. Dominic, I’ll leave it to you. It would be good if there were some familiar faces around her when she comes out of the anesthetic. But no more than two of you, please.”

Dominic’s grim expression relaxed slightly. He allowed her a fleeting, brief half-smile. “Stefani, come with me. KaWai, take the rest of the Family home and get them fed. Tell Bui that he’s been damned lucky. Damned lucky.” With those abrupt commands, he left the room with his shuffling, slow walk that still somehow managed to appear regal. The rest of the family murmured for a few minutes, thanking me and Hui, and then drifted from the clinic into the cold night. Eventually, only Hui and myself were left.

“He really doesn’t like you, does he?”

That garnered a laugh that might have come from the eastern desert. “You noticed.”

“So what’s the problem between the two of you?”

“What do you think is the problem?” I answered shortly, hating the bitterness in my voice but unable to keep the emotion out. “He knows about me, just like you do. ‘Poor Anaïs—from what I’ve heard, there’s no chance she’s going to have children. And what about her and Ochiba? Don’t you think they were just a little too close...’”

I stopped. Blinked. I was staring at the wall behind Hui, at the pencil and charcoal sketch of Ochiba I’d done years before, while she was pregnant with Euz. Hui had taken the piece without my knowledge from the desk drawer into which I’d stuffed it. He’d matted and framed the drawing, then placed it on the clinic wall as a Naming Day gift. Don’t ever be timid about your talents, he’d said. Gifts like yours are too rare on this world to be hidden. And don’t hide your feelings, either, girl—those are also far too rare.

Well, Hui, that’s a wonderfully idealistic statement, but it doesn’t fit into this world we’ve made for ourselves. There are some things that are better left stuffed in the drawer.

“You can’t let him intimidate you,” Hui said. “I don’t care how old and venerated he is...”

“That’s khudda, Hui, and we both know it. What Dominic says, goes—and that’s true even for the other Families, too. With the exception of Vladimir Allen-Levin and Tozo Koda-Shimmura, Dominic’s the Eldest, and poor Vlad’s so senile—” I cut off my own words with a motion of my hands. “Hui, we don’t need to talk about this. Not now. It’s really not important. Euzhan should be coming around about now. Why don’t you go back and check on her? Dominic would be more comfortable if you were there.”

He didn’t protest, which surprised me. Hui touched my shoulder gently, pressing once, then turned. I sat in one of the ornate clinic chairs (carved by my da Derek when Hui had declared me “graduated” from his tutelage) and leaned my head back, closing my eyes. I stayed there for several minutes until I heard Dominic and Hui’s voices, sounding as if they were heading back into the lobby. I didn’t feel like another round of frigid exchanges with Dominic, so I rose and walked into the coldroom lab.

It was warmer there than in his presence.

I set the pot of thorn-vine sap over the bunsen to heat, put on a clean gown and mask, then scrubbed my hands. I plunged still-wet hands into the warm, syrupy goo, then raised them so that the brown-gold, viscous liquid coated my fingers and hands, turning my hands until the sap covered the skin evenly. After it dried, I pulled out the gurney holding the Miccail body. I stared at it (him? her?) for a time, not really wanting to work but feeling a need to do some thing. I straightened the legs, examining again the odd, in-explicable genitalia.

“Ana?”

The voice sent quick shivers through me. I felt my cheeks flush, almost guiltily, and I turned. “El. Komban wa. I thought you’d left.”

“Went out to get some air.” Elio stepped into the room. “I, ummm, just wanted to thank you. For Euzhan. Dominic, he...he should have told you himself, but I know that he’s grateful, too.”

“He didn’t need to thank me. Besides, Euzhan’s rather special to me, too.”

“I know. But Dominic still shouldn’t have been so rude.” Not many in his Family dared to criticize Dominic to anyone else; the fact that Elio did dampened some of my irritation with him. Elio tugged at the jacket he wore, pulling down the cloth sleeves. “So that’s your bogman, huh? Elena told me about how she found it. Pretty ugly.”

“Give the poor Miccail a break. You’d be ugly too if you sat in a peat bog for a couple thousand years. It’s hell on the complexion.”

Elio grinned at that. “Yeah, I guess so. Might give me some color, though. Couldn’t hurt.” He leaned forward for a closer look, and I felt myself interposing between Elio and the Miccail, as I had earlier. Elio didn’t seem to notice. After another glance at the body, he moved away.

“You planning to become the next Gabriela?” he asked, then blushed, as he realized that he’d given the words an undercurrent he hadn’t intended. “I mean, you work too much, Ana,” he said quickly. “You’re always here. When’s the last time you did a drawing or went to a Gather?”

Ages. The answer surfaced in my mind. Far too long.

But I couldn’t say any of the words. I only shrugged. “Elio, if I’m going to get anything done...”

“Sorry,” he said reflexively. “I understand.”

He didn’t leave. He watched as I worked patiently on the hand I’d uncovered earlier, straightening the fingers and the ragged webbing between them. When, sometime later, he cleared his throat, I looked up.

“Listen,” Elio said. “When you’re done here, do you have plans? I thought, well, we haven’t been together in a long time...”

Two years. I haven’t been with anyone in almost two years. “El...” The unexpected proposition sent guilty thoughts skittering through my mind. You’re the last of the Koda-Levin line, unless Mam Shawna gets pregnant again—and she’s already showing signs of menopause. If they heard that you turned someone down, after all this time -

And then: Ochiba would tell you to do it. You know she would.

“El, I just don’t know.”

“Think about it,” he said. Muscles relaxed in his pale face; he gave a faint smile. “It’s not because of today,” he told me. “Just in case that’s what you’re thinking.”

It had been, of course. Anaïs: the charity fuck. “No. Of course not.”

“That’s good. It’s just that I haven’t seen you much recently with all your work, and being with you today, even under the circumstances, I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed talking with you.”

I wondered whether he’d also forgotten the miserable failure the last time we tried to make love.

“I’m sorry, Ana. I don’t know what the problem is,” he said, even though we both knew well enough. I kissed away the apology, pretending that I didn’t care. I think I even managed to smile.

I was fairly certain he’d only asked me as a favor to Ochiba.

“No,” I said. “It’s me. Not you. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” But we both had, and Elio had slipped away from my bed as quickly as he could, pleading an early morning appointment we both knew was a fiction.

I had spent the rest of the night alternating between tears and anger.

“Elio, I’m afraid tonight...well, it wouldn’t be good. I’m tired, and I was planning to stay here, just in case Euz needs some help.” I lifted my sap-stained fingers. “I was hoping to get some of this work done, also.” The excuses came too fast and probably one too many; I saw in his face that he realized it too. Guilt warred with anxiety over the battle-ground of conscience and won an entirely Pyrrhic victory.

“El, I’m sorry. It’s just that I....“ I stopped, deciding that there wasn’t much use in trying to explain what I didn’t fully understand myself. And there was the guilt of turning down an opportunity when I’d yet to become pregnant and those chances seemed to come less and less. “Anyway, I can do this some other time, and chances are Euz is going to be fine. Give me a bit, just to make sure that Euz is stabilized and to clean up again...”

I wasn’t sure what it was I saw in his face. “Sure. Good. I’ll come by then. At your Family compound?”

I nodded. We were being so polite now. “I’ll meet you in the common room.”

“Okay. See you then.” Awkwardly, he leaned over and kissed me. His lips were dry, the touch almost brotherly, but I enjoyed it. Before I could pull his head down to me again, he straightened. Cold air replaced his warmth. “See you about NinthHour?”

“That would be fine.”

After Elio had left, I halfheartedly cleaned some of the clinging peat from the folds of the Miccail’s face. “What were you like?” I asked the misshapen, crushed flesh. “And do you have any advice for someone who isn’t sure she just made the right decision?”

The ancient body didn’t answer. I sighed and went to the sink to scrub my hands.

context:

Ama Martinez-Santos

There were times that Ama regretted having been apprenticed to Hui. However, Geema Kyra had given her no choice in the matter, and an elder’s word was always law. Hui was never satisfied—no matter how fast Ama moved or how well she did something, Hui always pointed out how she could have done it faster, better, or more effectively another way. Hayat was given the same harsh treatment, but that didn’t lessen the impact. Ama was fairly certain that it was not possible to satisfy Hui.

And then there was Anaïs. She was just fucking weird. A good doctor, yes, and at least she’d give out a crumb of praise now and then, but she was...strange. The way she used all her free time lately examining that nasty body Elena had found....

Anaïs had told her to put the Miccail’s body back in the coldroom. Ama threw a sheet over the thing before she moved it—she couldn’t stand to see the empty bag of alien flesh; she hated the earthy smell of the creature and the leathery, unnatural feel of its skin. The thing was creepy—it didn’t surprise Ama that it had been killed.

Ama had heard her mi and da talking—there was a nasty rumor that Anaïs and Ochiba had been lovers, though as Thandi always pointed out, Ochiba had died after giving birth to Euzhan, so if Anaïs was a rezu, then it hadn’t stopped Ochiba from sleeping with men. Ama sometimes wondered what it would be like, making love to another woman....

She shivered. That was a sure way to be shunned. That’s what had happened to Gabriela—the second and final time she had been shunned. .

Ama wheeled the gurney into the coldroom. She slid the bog body into its niche and hurried out of the room.

She didn’t look back as she turned out the lights. Afterward, she scrubbed her hands at the sink in the autopsy room, twice, even though she knew that would make her late changing Euzhan’s dressings and Hui would yell at her again.

voice:

Anaïs Koda-Levin the Younger

Most of my erotic memories don’t involve fucking. I suppose the wet piston mechanics of sex never aroused me as much as other things. Smaller things. More intimate things. I can close my eyes and remember......at one of the Gathers, dancing the whirlwind with a few dozen others out on the old shuttle landing pad, when I noticed Marshall Koda-Schmidt watching from the side in front of the bonfire. I was twelve and just a half year past my menarche, which had come much later than I’d wanted. Marsh was older, much older—one of the fifth generation—and in my eyes appeared to be far more sensual than the gawky boys my own age. He stood there, trying to keep up a conversation with Hui over the racing, furious beat of the musicians. I kept watching him as I danced, laughing as I turned and pranced through the intricate steps, and I noticed we both had the same stone on our necklaces. I thought that an omen. During one of the partner changes, there was suddenly an open space between us, and Marsh looked up from his conversation out to the dance. His gaze snared mine; he smiled. At that moment, one of the logs fell and the bonfire erupted into a coiling, writhing column of bright fireflies behind him. I was caught in those eyes, those older and, I thought, wiser eyes. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and every time I looked, it seemed he was also watching me. I smiled; he laughed and applauded me. I felt flushed and giddy, and I laughed louder and danced harder, sweating with the energy even in the night cold, stealing glances to-ward Marshall. We smiled together, and as I danced, I felt I was dancing with him. For him. To him...

...Chi-Wa’s fingers stroking my bare shoulder and running down my arm, my skin almost electric under his gentle touch, inhaling his warm, sweet breath as we lay there with our mouths open, so close, so close but not quite touching. When his hand had traversed the slope of my arm and slipped off to tumble into the nest of my lap, our lips finally met at the same time...

...sitting with Ochiba at the preparation table in the Allen-Shimmura compound’s huge kitchen, peeling sweet-melon for the dessert. We were just talking, not saying anything important really, but the words didn’t matter. I was intoxicated by the sound of Ochiba’s voice, drunk on her laugh and the smell of her hair and the sheer familiar presence of her. I’d just finished cutting up one of the melons and Ochiba reached across me to steal a piece. She sucked the fruit into her mouth in exaggerated mock triumph while the orange-red juice ran down her chin in twin streaks. For some reason, that struck us both as hilarious, and we burst into helpless laughter. Ochiba reached over and we hugged, and I was so aware of her body, of the feel of her against me, of how soft her breasts seemed under the faux-cotton blouse. Then the confusion hit, making me blush as I realized that what I was feeling was something I wasn’t prepared or expecting to feel, and knowing by the way Ochiba’s embrace suddenly tightened around me that she was feeling it as well, and was just as frightened and awed by the emotions as I was...

Moments. Those fleeting seconds when the sexual tension is highest, when you’re alone in a universe of two where nothing else can intrude.

Of course, then reality usually hits. After the Gather, I turned down two other offers of company and went back to my compound alone, with one last smile for Marshall. I left my outer door open, certain that Marshall would come to me that night, but he never did.

Chi-Wa was so involved in his own arousal and pleasure that I quickly realized that I was nothing more than another anonymous vessel for his glorious seed.

And Ochiba, the only one of them who was truly important to me...well, in another year she was dead.

Tonight, I was keeping reality away with a glass of da Joel’s pale ale, and trying to stop thinking that it was late and that I wished I’d just told Elio no. There was no one else in the common room; Che, Joel, and Derek had all grinned, made quick excuses, and left when I’d mentioned that I was staying up because Elio was coming over. I requested the room to play me Gabriela’s Reflections on the Miccail and leaned back in the chair as the first pulsing chords of the dobra sounded. The chair was one of da Jason’s creations, with a padded, luxurious curved back that seemed to wrap and enfold you—very womblike, very private: I’d never known Jason, who had died when I was very young, but his was my favorite listening chair. The family pet, a verrechat Derek had rescued from a spring flood five years before, came up and curled into my lap. I stroked the velvety, nearly transparent skin of the creature, and watched its heart pulse behind the glassy muscles and porcelain ribs. I shut my eyes and let the rising drone of the music carry me somewhere else. I barely heard the clock chiming NinthHour.

“I never thought Gabriela was much of a composer.”

“She’d have agreed with you,” I answered. “And I think you’re both wrong. She was a fine composer; the problem was that she just wasn’t much of a musician. You have to imagine what she was trying to play rather than what actually came out. Hello, Elio.”

I told the room to lower the music and pulled the chair back up. The verrechat glared at me in annoyance and went off in search of a more stable resting place. Elio gave me an uncertain smile. “You looked so comfortable, I almost didn’t want to interrupt.”

“Sorry. Music’s my meditation. I spend more time here than’s good for me.”

He nodded. I nodded back. Great conversationalists, both of us. I should have kept the music up. At least we could have both pretended to be listening to it. “Any change in Euzhan?” he asked at last, just as the silence was threatening to swallow us. I hurried into the opening, grateful.

“When I left, she was sleeping. Hui’s keeping her doped up right now. When I left, Dominic was still there, but Hui was trying to convince him that camping out in the clinic wasn’t going to help. I’m not sure he was making much progress.”

“Geeda Dominic can be pretty strong-willed.”

“Uh-huh. And water can be pretty wet.”

Elio grinned. The grin faded slowly, and he was just Elio again. We both looked at each other. “Umm,” he began.

If you’re going through with this, then do it, I told myself. “Elio, let’s go to my room,” I said, trying to make it sound like something other than “And get this over with.” I was rewarded with a faint smile, so maybe Elio wasn’t as reluctant as I’d thought. I’d been planning to let him back out now, if that’s what he wanted, figuring that if this was simply a guilt fuck, we were both better off without it—for most women I knew, sex simply for the sake of sex was something you did the first year or two after menarche. By then, you’d gone through most of the available or interested males on Mictlan. In my case, that hadn’t been too many, not after the first time around. Since then, with one glorious and forbidden exception, the only regular liaison I’ve had has been with Hui’s speculum and some cold semen, once a month.

Even that hasn’t worked out.

All that was long ago. Forget it. The voice wasn’t entirely convincing, but I held out my hand, and Elio took the invitation without hesitating. Tugging on my fingers, he pulled me toward him, and this time he kissed me. There was a hunger in the kiss this time, and I found parts of me awakening that I thought had been dead.

I suddenly wanted this to work, and that increased my nervousness. I wondered if he could tell how scared I was.

Elio either sensed that fright, or he’d learned a lot since the last time. In my admittedly noncomprehensive experience, men tended to go straight for the kill, shedding clothes on the way so they didn’t snag them on rampant erections. Maybe that was just youthful exuberance, but I’d spent many postcoital hours crying, believing that the quickness and remoteness was because they wanted to get the deed done as fast as possible. Because it was me. ‘Just doing my duty, ma’am. Have to make sure that we increase the population, after all. Nothing personal.’

Except that sex is always personal and always intimate, no matter what the reasons for it might he. In the midst, I might look up to see my partner’s eyes closed, a look almost of pain on his face as he thrust into me, and I knew he was gone, lost in imagined couplings with someone else.

Not with me. Never with me. Never together.

Elio pulled away. I breathed, watching him. He was still here. “This way,” I said, and led him off.

I’d done some quick housekeeping before he’d come, and the room actually looked halfway neat except for the mirror, as always draped in clothing. Through the folds I caught a reflection of someone who looked like me, her face twisted in uncertain lines.

When I closed the door and turned, Elio was closer to me than I expected, and I started, leaning back against the jamb. He touched my cheek, stroked my hair. As his hand cupped the back of my head, he pulled me into him, his arms going around me. Neither of us had said anything. I leaned my head against his shoulder. He continued to stroke my hair.

I wondered what he was thinking, and when I turned my head up to look, he kissed me again: gently, warmly, his lips slightly parted. This time the kiss was longer, more demanding, and I found myself opening my mouth to him, pulling his head down even further. His hands dropped from my shoulders; his fingers teased my nipples through my blouse, and they responded to his touch, ripening and making me shudder.

When we finally broke apart again, his pale eyes searched mine with soft questions. I reached behind us and touched the wall plate, the lights gliding down into darkness as I did so. “I can’t see, Ana.”

“You don’t need to.”

“I’d like to look at you.”

“Elio...”

A pause. Silence, He waited.

Biting my lower lip, I touched the plate again, letting the lights rise to a golden dimness. I stepped deliberately away from him. Standing in front of my bed, I undid the buttons of my blouse, of my pants. I held the clothes to me, hugging myself, then took a breath and let them fall to the floor. I stood before Elio, defiantly naked. I shivered, though the room wasn’t cold.

I knew what he was seeing. I might keep my mirror covered, but I knew.

Under a wide-featured face, he saw a woman’s body, with small breasts and flared hips. Extending below the triangle of pubic hair, though, there was something wrong, some-thing that didn’t belong: a hint of curved flesh.

An elongated, enlarged clitoris, Hui had told my mother, who noticed it at birth: a paranoid, detailed examination of every newborn child is Mictlan’s birthright. A slight to moderate hermaphrodism. I doubt that it’s anything to stop her from reaching her Naming. Everything else is female and normal. She may never notice.

Maybe Hui would have been right had everything stayed as it was when I was a child. I certainly paid no attention to my small deformity, nor did anyone else. I didn’t seem much different from the other little girls I saw. After menarche, though....My periods from the beginning were so slight as to be nearly unnoticeable and the pale spottings weren’t at all like the dark menstrual flow of the other women. I also began to notice how sensitive I was there, how the oversized nub of flesh had begun to change, to swell until the growth protruded well past my labial folds, pushing them apart before ducking under the taut and distended clitoral hood.

Over the years, even after menarche, the change continued. The last time I glanced at a mirror, I thought I looked like an effeminate and not particularly pretty young man with his penis tucked between his legs, pretending to be a woman.

Elio’s gaze never drifted that low. I noticed, and tried to pretend that it didn’t matter. I wanted to believe that it didn’t matter. He took a step toward me He cupped my breasts in his hands, his skin so pale against mine. I fumbled with his shirt, finally getting it open and sliding it down his shoulders. Elio was thin, though his waist rounded gently at the belt line.

His skin was very warm.

I pulled him into bed on top of me...and sometime later...later...

No, I’m sorry. I can’t say. I won’t say.

journal entry:

Gabriela Rusack

I was a slow learner when it came to the difference between love and sex. Oh, I knew that people could enjoy sex without being in love with the person they’re with at the moment. God knows I experienced that myself often enough...and often enough kicked myself in the morning for paying attention to whining hormones.

As I grew older, I slowly realized that the reverse was also a possibility—I could be in love with someone and not have sex with them, if that wasn’t in the cards. I needed friends more than I needed lovers, and I found that sex can actually destroy love.

Lacina was my college roommate, and my friend. At the time, I was still mainly heterosexual, though I’d already had my first tentative encounters with women. I think Lacina suspected that I was experimenting, but we never really talked about it. I dated guys and slept with some of them, just as she did, so if on rare occasions a girlfriend stayed overnight, she just shrugged and said nothing. One Friday night in my junior year, neither of us had a date. We were drinking cheap wine and watching erotic holos in our apartment, and the wine and the holos had made us both silly and horny. I remember putting my arm around Lacina, playfully, and how sweet her lips were when I finally leaned over to kiss her, and her breathy gasp when I touched her breasts....We tumbled into my bed and I made love to her, and showed her how to make love to me. But the next morning, when the wine fumes had cleared....

After that night, it was never the same between us. There was a wall inside Lacina that had never been there before, and she flinched if I’d come near her or touch her. I don’t know why she was retreated. I don’t know what old guilt I’d tapped; afterward, it wasn’t a subject on which she’d allow discussion. She pretended that our night together had never happened. She pretended that things were the same as they had been, but they weren’t, and we both knew it. At the end of the semester, she moved out.

No, sex and love are basically independent of each other. Not that it matters for me, not anymore. My closest friends are dead, and those here on Mictlan that I thought were friends won’t talk to me at all anymore.

No more sex. No more love. I spend my remaining days with the only passion I have left, the only passion allowed me: the cold and dead Miccail.

Now if sex, love, and passion are intricate, varied, and dangerous for us, then the sexuality of the Miccail must have been positively labyrinthian. I can only imagine how convoluted their relationships were, with the midmale sex complicating things. I wonder how they loved, and I try to decipher the answer from the few clues left: the stelae, the crumbling ruins, the ancient artifacts. I wonder why this world saw fit to add another sex into the biological mix, but the past holds its secrets too well.

What frightens me is that I’m certain it’s important for us to know. The Miccail died only a thousand years ago. With all the artifacts, all the structures they left behind, none of them we’ve found are any younger than that. From what I’ve been able to determine, the collapse and decline of the Miccail began another thousand years before their extinction, possibly linked with the rapid disappearance of the mid-males, all mention of whom vanish from the stelae at that point. One short millennium later—barely a breath in the life of the world and the Miccail’s own long history—and the Miccail were gone, every last one.

It’s almost as if Something didn’t like them.

And now we’re here, filling our lungs and our bodies with Mictlan-stuff. Yes, we sampled and tested Mictlan’s air, water and soil, let it flow through the assorted filters and gauges until the machines stamped the world with their cold imprimatur. The proportion of gases was within our body tolerances. We could taste the winds of this world and live. Our lungs would move, the oxygen would flow in our blood. But Mictlan is not Earth. The atmosphere of a world holds its own life, and life moves within it.

So we take a deep breath of Mictlan and we bring the alien presence into our lungs because we have no choice. We will slowly become Mictlan. Mictlan will become us.

And the Something that obliterated the Miccail will take a long look at us: because we are here, because we breathe, because we drink the water and eat the plants.

I wonder if that Something will like us better than it did the Miccail
interlude:

KaiSa

After leaving Masta, Kai had gone directly to ker rooms in the TeTa house and packed the few belongings which were truly kers into ker traveling pouch: the well-used grinding stones for herbs and potions which JaqSa had given ker as a parting gift the first time ke’d left the sacred Sa island called AnglSaiye; the parchment book of medicines, written in the private language of the Sa with the sacred inks only the Sa knew how to make; the relic of VeiSaTi which was ker authorization to move freely outside the island; the tools of sacrifice. Ke left behind the fine anklet BieTe had carved for ker from redstone, with crystalline images of BieTe and MasTa’s sacred animals set in the swirling, ornate patterns. Keeping the jewelry would only remind ker of Bie and Mas, and of the children ke had helped to sire here.

It was painful enough to leave. It was even more painful to have to remember.

Kai shouldered ker pack and pushed open the door. A hand pushed ker back inside: NosXe, one of BieTe’s adopted sons. Kai stumbled and fell backward, striking ker left shoulder hard on the flagstone floor. “My father said you would try to leave,” Nos grumbled. “You don’t know how much BieTe and MasTa care for you, KaiSa.”

“I know all too well, Nos,” Kai answered. “And if I didn’t love them in return, I wouldn’t be leaving now. Cycles from now, if you become Te, you will understand that. Tell me, Nos, did BieTe or MasTa send you here?”

NosXe didn’t have to answer; the grim stubbornness on his face told Kai that the young son of Bie had acted on his own. Kai rubbed ker sore shoulder, knowing it would shame Nos even more to see that he had injured a Sa.

“I thought not. Your Ta and Te know that it’s the curse of Sa to always travel, to leave those they love most. Your Ta and Te know that no matter how much they would like me to stay, I cannot. And they cannot make me stay, not without raising the wrath of VeiSaTi Kerself. Is that what you’re willing to risk, Nos? Are you willing to defy a god?”

Always before, that had worked. It was the threat of VeiSaTi’s anger that kept all Sa safe. Kai thought that the warning, a doctrine taught to all of the CieTiLa—The People—from childhood, had worked now. Still rubbing ker shoulder, ke got to ker feet and started to walk out past the grim-faced Nos, who still blocked the doorway. But as ke brushed past, Nos reached out with a hand and grabbed Kai’s shoulder with his right hand, his talons slightly extended.

“No,” Nos started to say, but Kai had already reacted.

Kai slapped ker left hand on top of Nos’, claws out. At the same time, ke turned ker hip back and brought ker right arm on top of Nos’, dropping ker weight. Cloth tore on Kai’s shoulder, but Nos howled in pain as his wrist was torqued. The much larger Xe collapsed to his knees to escape the pressure, and Kai completed the pin, taking the struggling Nos down to the floor. Holding Nos’ wrist with one hand, ke reached out with ker long fingers and pressed them on either side of Nos’ neck, just below the ears—closing the arteries. Nos’ struggles became weaker; a few seconds later, he went limp.

Kai released the pin. Ke checked to make sure that Nos was still breathing, then stood. “The Sa are also taught to protect those they love,” Kai told the unconscious Nos. “That is another thing you must learn. What you love most is also the most dangerous to you.”

Ke stepped over Nos. Ke found that now that it was over, ke was shaking from the sudden encounter. The settlement of BieTe and MasTa, which had once seemed so peaceful and welcoming, now frightened ker.

Ke walked away, almost at a run.

BieTe had started the ceremonial fire on the bluff over-looking the sea. KaiSa could see the smear of dark smoke against the twilight sky and the silhouetted figures of BieTe’s people as they moved in the preliminary dance of welcome to the new infant. But Kai saw them only in the distance.

Ke moved quickly from the settlement into the woods. A few of the Je and Ja saw ker, but—under the bonds of servitude and at the bottom of the social structure of the CieTiLa—there was no chance that any of them would, like NosXe, challenge Kai’s right to go where ke wanted, whenever ke wanted. One of the Ja watched as ke moved away from the cluster of wood and stone buildings; Kai knew that the word would get to BieTe, either from the Ja or from NosXe, as soon as he returned to the ceremony, but by that time it would be too late.

I’m sorry that it had to be this way, Kai told the distant image of the fire. BieTe, MasTa, I’m sorry to miss the ceremony for my own daughter, but in your hearts, you understand. You must understand, You know the laws as well as I do, A Sa must give ker Gift to all CieTiLa, and that means I must hurt the two of you,

It means I must hurt myself,

KaiSa put ker back to the fire, to BieTe and MasTa, and to ker daughters and sons, and moved into the forest.

Under the canopy of sweet-leaves, the twilight quickly shifted to full night. The wind was from the west, shivering the leaves with its chill and bringing the scent of flowers. A wingclaw called from its night roost high in one of the trees, the creature’s ululating whoop raising the hairs on Kai’s arms. The phosphorescent mosses on the many-trunked trees framed the darkness, and the double moons were up, Chali just setting, though Quali was well above the horizon in the east, bright enough that ke could almost see the colors of the leaves. The sound of ker feet shushing through the fallen leaves seemed the loudest sound, though the rhythmic kuh-whump of the slickskins calling for their mates in a nearby pond was a constant backdrop.

It was tempting to stop, to try and listen to the voice of VeiSaTi in the rustling and chirping of the world, but there was no time for that now.

Kai knew that there was a wayhouse not far distant. Until ke had actually made the decision to leave, ke had given no thought to where ke might go next. Now, ke determined to stop for the rest of the night at the wayhouse. Ke lengthened ker stride, falling into ker quick walking pace.

When Quali had reached the zenith, its silver light painting the edges of the leaves, Kai came upon the High Road and the wayhouse. The High Road was the main artery through the CieTiLa lands, a trail of flagged stone, a path between all the settlements of the CieTiLa designed by the legendary Sa leader NasiSaTu over six terduva ago, and completed by ker successors after NasiSaTu’s sacrificial death. The various segments of the road were maintained by the Te and Ta of the lands through which they passed, part of the payment for the services of the mendicant Sa order.

The nasituda set in front of the wayhouse declared it to be on the border of the territory of GaiTe and CiTa. For the first time since ke had left, Kai felt ker muscles relax fully, releasing a tension ke hadn’t even known ke’d been holding. A light from an oil lamp glimmered behind the translucent window, made from the brais of one of the huge but slow thunderbeasts: someone else was already in the wayhouse. Kai gave a low, warbling call of greeting as ke approached the building, waited the polite sequence of sixteen slow breaths, then entered, brushing aside the thunderbeast hide door covering.

The wayhouse was built along typical CieTiLa lines: a large common room where travelers could talk and eat; a small kitchen to the left for food preparation and storage, and three tiny sleeping cubicles to the right. The privacy curtain was drawn on one of those, and a Sa poked ker head out as Kai entered, rubbing ker eyes sleepily.

“Kai?”

“AbriSa!”

Abri tumbled out of the low sleeping cubicle and ran to Kai. The two Sa embraced, laughing. Kai had come to the island some time after Abri’s arrival, and the older youth had been one of Kai’s mentors, comforting the disoriented and frightened child of three cycles and helping to teach Kai the intricate structure of Sa life. It was Abri who, when Kai had taken First Vows, had taken an inked needle to Kai’s chest and marked ker with the symbol of AnglSaiye. Kai’s debt to Abri had been paid long ago, when Kai had kerself taken one of the arriving children as ker special project, passing along the knowledge Abri had given ker. Abri had left the AnglSaiye sanctuary long before Kai had been given JaqSaTu’s blessing and ker own sanction to begin ker travels through the CieTiLa lands. Kai held Abri at arm’s length, looking at ker. ke could see the cycles and the pain of many separations in ker face, in the flesh-hewn valleys of experience VeiSaTi had etched there.

“Where are you traveling to, Abri?” Kai asked when they finally pulled apart. Where are you going? Where have you been? Those were the eternal questions of Sa meeting on the road.

“Actually, I was looking for you, among others.”

“For me? You’re joking. Why?”

Abri didn’t answer. Instead, ke pulled away from Kai, and the furrows in ker face deepened as ke frowned. “Let me fix some kav. You looked tired,” ke said.

Kai watched Abri as ke went into the kitchen and poured the bittersweet, herbal brew into two wooden mugs. “I’ve been on the island for the past two cycles,” ke said as ke placed the pottery jug back into the coldbox sunk into the kitchen’s floor. Ke brought the mugs out and handed one to Kai. Ke sipped carefully—”once for TeTa, again for XeXa, and last for Jeja,” three being the sacred number of VeiSaTi—then sank down onto one of the large pillows at the edge of the eating pit. “There have been disturbing rumors, Kai,” ke said finally. “I’m just one of several who have been sent out by JaqSaTu to bring all Sa back to the island.”

The words sent the kav swirling, almost spilling from the mug as Kai started. To bring all the Sa back to AnglSaiye, bring all of us back from our journeys....It was something that had never been done before, in all the cycles upon cycles written down on the nasitudas set on AnglSaiye’s shores. It was something Kai could very nearly not comprehend. “I don’t understand...”

“You will, when you get back there.” Abri sipped ker kav once more, staring into the brown depths of the mug. “I really can’t say more, except to say that it is becoming a dangerous world for Sa.”

Kai, remembering BieTe and MasTa, and ker departure of only a few hours ago, opened hard-ridged lips in a grin. “Love is always dangerous, AbriSa. I have the bruises to prove it.”

But Abri didn’t share in the jest. Abri’s dark, expressive eyes regarded Kai’s, and there was pain in ker gaze.

“This is different, Kai,” ke said. “This is something no Sa has faced before.”

context:

Masafumi Martinez-Santos

Masa grunted as he slung the fish onto the kitchen’s well-used preparation table. The river grouper was a meter long and nearly twenty-five kilos. A steel cable ran through the mouth and out the gill slits, and thin streamers of blood trickled from the flank and dripped from Masa’s overalls onto the stone-flagged floor.

Masa leaned his gig and spear against the wall, and pulled the straps of the stiff, sap-impregnated overalls from his shoulders. Stepping out of the legs, he tossed the overalls down the stairwell to the washing rooms. He stood in the kitchen in soggy woolen underclothes.

“I suppose you expect me to clean that?” his mi Adja said. She was pulling loaves from the oven, and the yeasty smell of warm bread fought the river scent of the grouper. Adja moved stiffly—her spine had fused in early childhood, not allowing her to bend over or to turn without moving her whole body. She turned like a marionette lashed to hidden strings, using her legs to move up and down.

“I did the hard work. Should’ve seen it fight. The groupers are running back to the sea early this year. The swarm knocked me down twice before I snagged this one, and you know how fucking cold the river is. The overalls leaked—Luis needs to put more thornvine sap on them. I’m freezing and wet and hungry.” He started to reach past Adja to the bread steaming on the counter.

Adja slapped his hand away. The crack of her hand on his was surprisingly loud. “There’s your dinner, dripping all over my clean floor. You can have sashimi, or you can help me gut and fillet the beast.”

“Damn it, Adja...”

“Damn it yourself, Masa. Just because it’s my rotation in the kitchen doesn’t mean I do all the work.”

“I need to go out, Adja.”

Adja sniffed. “So who are you seeing now?”

Masa grinned. “Whoever wants to see me. I’m not picky.”

“So I’ve heard.” Adja removed another tray of loaves from the oven, rotating her whole upper body as she set the bread on the cooling racks. “Masa, you need to be careful. There’s talk in the Baths.”

“What kind of talk?”

“That you’re sometimes rough. That you can hurt. Masa, I’ve told you—with your past, you can’t afford that.”

“Khudda,” Masa said. “Who’s saying that crap about me?”

Adja shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’m just telling you for your own good.”

Masa grimaced. “All right, so I’m told. If they don’t like me, they don’t have to fuck me, do they?”

Adja’s face hardened. Her eyes narrowed, the lips pursed. If Masa noticed, he pretended not to care. She opened a drawer and rummaged in it. Steel clashed. She pulled out a filleting knife and laid it alongside the grouper. “Take care of the fish. Then you can do whatever you want to do.”

Almost, Masa refused. But that would have led to Adja complaining to his mam Seela, and then Geema Kyra would have gotten involved, and the rest of the Family. Too much trouble. Instead, as he scraped the scales from the grouper and slit open the belly, he pretended that it was one of them, one of the women talking about him in the Baths.

The thought gave him an erection that lasted until long afterward. . .

voice:

Elio Allen-Shimmura

Dominic wouldn’t talk to me for three days after I was with Anaïs, enclosing himself in an atmosphere of cold, silent fury. Whenever he saw me in the compound his eyes narrowed until they looked like Tlilapan: black ponds nearly hidden in the folds holding them. His lips pressed together until they appeared to form more of a sphincter than a mouth, and he would make sure I noticed his glare, which was damn near incandescent.

For my part, I made certain that he noticed that I noticed, and didn’t give him the reaction he wanted. I may love Dominic, but I don’t like him.

A lot of the Family feel that way, even if very few of them will admit it.

At the table at SixthHour, where he always ruled the conversation, I was pointedly not invited to offer my opinion on the subject de jour, and when I deigned to do so anyway, there was a quick silence as everyone paid rapt attention to the food on their plates. Not that it mattered—the subject was always Euzhan and her progress. Funny how Dominic managed to avoid mentioning Anaïs’s name during those conversations, even though I knew Ana was tending Euz as if she were her own child.

I’m certain that word was judiciously leaked to Dominic from the others in my Family that I spent a night with someone else the night after I’d been with Anaïs. It didn’t require a hell of a psychological background to figure out the reasons underlying that decision. Even so, I was amazed at the relief I felt when, yes, the equipment still worked, thank you very much.

Finally, on the fourth day, as I was sitting in the common room talking with young Dominic and Sarah a little past FirstHour, Geeda Dominic came into the room. He dismissed Domi and Sarah with a barely perceptible nod of his head; they scattered. Andrea, Bui, and Hizo, noisily playing jack-stones in a corner, judiciously decided to continue the game somewhere else.

It was suddenly very quiet in the room. I could hear the soft hissing of the peat brick fire in the stone hearth. I watched Dominic sit—no one else ever dared sit in that chair, one of Jason Koda-Levin’s intricate creations. The chair was (very quietly) called “the throne” by most of us. Dominic grumbled and muttered to himself until he was comfortable, holding his hands out toward the glowing peat, then took a long, slow inhalation that wobbled the loose skin under his chin. I waited. Finally, he looked at me.

“Well, is it true?”

“Is what true, Geeda Dominic?” I knew what he wanted to hear, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

He snorted. Whatever anyone might think of Dominic, his advanced age hadn’t made him senile, at least not in that way. “You’re not stupid, Elio, though you are often an ass. I’m too old to enjoy playing games that simply waste time, and I’d appreciate it if you don’t indulge in them.”

“All the nasty rumors to the contrary, Anaïs is female, Geeda,” I told him. “A woman. Pretty damn good in bed, too.”

Dominic nearly hissed at that—that was obviously not the answer he wanted. He rose from his chair faster than I’d seen him move in years.

“I don’t understand you, Elio,” he barked, standing in front of me, leaning heavily on his cane; I could see his hand on the copper-plated knob, with the extra vestigial finger jutting uselessly from the side. “You know what she did to Ochiba.”

“Anaïs didn’t do anything to Ochiba, Geeda. Ochiba died from complications after childbirth. It’s a damned shame, but it happens.”

“No!” Dominic spat, as I hit the nerve I’d aimed for. “Ochiba was killed, killed because of that...that rezu’s jealousy. Ochiba told me that. She stood in my room and said that Euzhan would be her last pregnancy—all because Anaïs had told her it was ‘dangerous.’ She said that Anaïs didn’t even want her to have this one. Anaïs didn’t want Ochiba to have another child so she could have Ochiba for herself. And when Ochiba had a child anyway, the vile woman took the opportunity and killed her.”

I’d heard parts of this horrible speculation of Dominic’s before, in whispered gossip from the older Family members. He’d begun to voice these suspicions not long after Ochiba’s death, and the theory had grown and solidified over the years. This was the first time he’d spoken of it openly to me; the blind anger in his voice was nearly visible. “Geeda, we both know that’s not what happened,” I said. He didn’t listen. He was full into his tirade now, and no mere truth was going to dam the vitriolic flood.

“...and yet you went to her, I’ve talked to Diana, who has seen Anaïs in the Baths, even though she tries to hide herself. She’s deformed, she’ll never have children, and because of her, Ochiba—who gave us four named children and would have given us more—is dead. Dead because she and Anaïs were—” He started to say the word. I saw him form it, and then close his mouth before it could emerge. Lovers. “Yet you’d lie for her,” he finished.

“She saved Euzhan.” And I like her, I should have added. She and Ochiba may have been more than our little society wants to tolerate, but I don’t care—I never saw Ochiba happier than she was during those months when she and Anaïs were close. I enjoy Anaïs’ company. I think she has a wonderful laugh, on those rare occasions when you can manage to coax one out of her. She works harder than anyone around here, and at least a dozen people we can both name wouldn’t be here if Anaïs wasn’t the best damned doctor we have. I think she’s been hurt enough, and she doesn’t deserve the crap you’ve handed her over the last few years.

But I didn’t say any of that. Dominic wouldn’t have listened, anyway.

“Hui saved Euzhan,” Dominic snapped back, his mouth closing sharply on the last syllable. “Anaïs is a freak, and she’s responsible for Ochiba’s death. I know it, you know it. She shouldn’t be tolerated, or she’ll corrupt someone else the way she did Ochiba. We can’t afford that. No Family can.”

“Geeda, Ochiba was her own woman. Any decisions she made, she made on her own. Anaïs didn’t kill Ochiba; Mictlan killed her.”

“Phah!” Dominic slammed the end of the cane on the floor for emphasis. “I won’t stand betrayal, Elio. You remember that, boy. I won’t stand it. The time is coming when Families will need to make hard decisions. Hard decisions—do you hear me?”

Dominic left the room with a last glare at me. I heard him snarling like a grumbler at the children in the hallway as he passed. They gave him meek, quick apologies. I sat in the chair assessing my various mental wounds; none of them seemed mortal. I figured I was set for at least another week of the Distant Glares, though.

I did wonder why I’d lied. “Anaïs is female, Geeda...” Well, honestly, Geeda Dominic, I’m not certain. A few years ago when I was with her, that extra ridge of flesh—like a featureless, thick finger shielding her opening—had confused me. Defeated me. Distracted as I was by it, well, I just couldn’t....That wasn’t Anaïs’ fault; it was mine.

This time...I still wasn’t sure what had happened.

This time, I’d managed to get beyond her deformity, to put it out of my mind. I concentrated on her face, her breasts, her skin, her kiss. And once I was inside her, hell, she didn’t feel much different than any other woman I’ve been with, and we were both responding. I was getting close...then I remember her shriek, which I think was more surprise than pain. There was a quick, strange hardness intruding between us, like a cock but smaller. I came at almost the same time.

And so did she. I heard her gasp, and cry out. And then...

I rolled away from her, shocked at the sudden sticky wetness all over my stomach, all over hers. As Ana sat up, her eyes frantic, I caught a glimpse of something in the tangle of pubic hair, like a child’s uncircumcised cock. There was blood, too, at the tip, as if it had just torn free from wherever it had been attached. The fold of flesh guarding her opening was gone. I said something, I don’t really remember what—probably something inane and stupid like “Are you all right?”

She was frantic, but again I think it was more from fear than any pain. Or maybe that’s just rationalization, because I didn’t go to her. Hell, if something that weird happened to me...Anyway, I stood there, that stuff dripping slowly down my stomach, thicker and more yellow than my come. She kept saying, “What’s happening to me?” over and over, wiping at herself with the sheet and then clutching it to her like a shield. She turned away from me. “Get out, Elio,” she said harshly, then more gently: “Please, Elio. Please go.”

Her naked back was to me. I could see her shoulders begin to shake with the first tears.

A truly compassionate person would have stayed with her. A person who wanted to be her friend as well as a lover would have stayed, would have shown her some compassion. Half the people in our generation have physical defects of one kind or another, varying from trivial to serious. So this one shouldn’t matter—look at the spots on my skin.

“Please go,” she told me. “I really want you to go...”

...and, well, I went.

I’ve tried to figure that one out, and the truth is that for that one moment, I was as disgusted and repelled by what I saw in front of me as Dominic would have been. I felt, I don’t know...

Dirty. Unclean. Contaminated.

I left. I took a long shower afterward, cleaning myself over and over again, and hating myself for the fact that it mattered.

It wasn’t Ana’s fault. None of it was her fault—I don’t know what she is, but she didn’t ask to be made that way. I could see that much in her eyes, in the way she acted with me just before. Maybe that’s why I lied to Dominic now, trying to make up for past failures. Trying to do penance for some of the guilt.

Too fucking bad I didn’t feel particularly absolved.

context:

Hui Koda-Schmidt

“Since Elio has been seeing her, I demand to know—as eldest of my family, Hui—whether Anaïs is a woman or an abomination.”

Hui grimaced. On his desk was a crystalline card. The light from his desk lamp coaxed a three-dimensional, moving image of a smiling oriental woman from the card’s surface: Akiko Koda, his ancestor. The card, his mam Melissa had told him, had been her ID card for the Ibn Battuta. Melissa had been given the card by her mam, Eleanor, who had been Akiko’s daughter.

Lately, the card was Hui’s meditation in times of stress. He’d certainly never known Akiko, who had died in the Great Storm of 23. Eleanor had given Hui the card just before her final illness a few years ago. “I look at this sometimes and pretend that she’s still there, listening to me, even though I was only a year old when she died,” Eleanor had told Hui. “Maybe she’ll be there for you, too. I will be. I promise.”

Hui wondered if Akiko’s kami was watching, and what she might think of Mictlan now. Akiko’s image turned toward him, slightly blurred through his cataracts, and smiled its eternal smile. Decades ago, Eleanor had told him, the card could speak: Akiko’s voice, giving her name. No longer. There was only the silent presence of his great-grandmam.

“Anaïs is a fine doctor, Dominic. That’s all you need to know. That’s all I’m telling you.”

“Khudda, Hui.” Dominic waved his cane, his six-fingered, knobby-jointed hand clutching the polished knob of wood at the end. “I’m not asking much of you. You know her; you examine her every few months. You know damn well that she and my Ochiba were...involved. I want to know. It’s my right to know.”

Dominic’s lips were pulled back, the dark eyes squinted, and his head was tilted back arrogantly, his nostrils flared.

Outrage Personified. The expression on the ancient face might have made Hui laugh, under other circumstances. Under other circumstances....But this was now, and he found himself rising from his chair and matching the old man stance for stance. Akiko’s card clattered on wood as he let it drop.

“You’re old, Dominic, and you had the privilege to actually know some of the Founders. That gives you a certain status in this society, and grants you certain privileges, but it grants you no rights. At least none that I’ll acknowledge. I’m going to tell you this once, then I expect you to leave. Anaïs is a fine person and a fine doctor, and without her, one hell of a lot of people here would not be walking around spreading nasty rumors. Even if Ochiba and Ana were lovers—and I’m saying if, Domi—that obviously didn’t stop Ochiba from conceiving children, so what does it matter? As to what I’ve seen in my examinations of Anaïs, that’s my business, not yours.”

Dominic sniffed. “But if she were normal, you’d say so, wouldn’t you? And you won’t. You can’t.”

Hui felt his cheeks coloring. He slapped his hand on the desk. “There are none of us ‘normal’ here, Dominic. None. Not me, not you, not anyone. Now, get out of my office. I’m tired of talking nonsense.”

Dominic slammed the end of his cane on the floor with an exasperated huff. He glared; Hui glared back. Finally, he turned and walked to the door, but stopped before he left. He spoke without turning around to Hui again. “We live in a fragile society,” Dominic said. “As an elder, it’s my job to protect us from things that threaten what stability we have. And I will protect us, Hui—no matter who it hurts.”

Hui had no answer to that. He touched the card, and Akiko’s image sprang to life. His ancestor smiled wordlessly at him as the sound of Dominic’s cane slowly faded down the corridor.

voice:

Elio Allen-Shimmura

The snow was orange-red with algae the storm had picked up from Crookjaw Bay. The world appeared to have rusted. The flakes tasted vaguely sour. Both Masafumi and I looked like we’d been bleeding where the snow had melted.

“Did you really fuck Anaïs?”

I was beginning to wonder if everyone was going to be asking that question, albeit a little more politely. “Yeah,” I answered tentatively, the word lifting at the end into almost a question as I squinted into the flake-infested wind. “I did.”

Masafumi raised thick eyebrows at that. He hefted the rifle he was carrying and flicked some clinging snow from the barrel. “I heard that old Dominic was mightily pissed.”

I frowned. “Who told you that?”

“Your sib Sarah.” Masa paused and gave me a grin I wished I could give back. “I was with her last night.”

Masafumi Martinez-Santos looks like something hewn from a block of wood rather than born. Everything about Masa is thick and rough: the ledges above his eyes, his cheek-bones, his chin, his hands. His skin is dry and scaly, as if some ancient reptilian ancestor infested the coils of his DNA. Bundled up as he was now, he looked like a troll.

Too bad there wasn’t any damn sun.

“Sarah should keep her mouth shut.” And her legs. I thought nastily. Sarah rarely turns down any offer of sex. Of course, she also has four named children, and at 29, is angling for another. Still, Masa…

“Maybe you should keep your pants buttoned,” Masa retorted. He smiled, showing teeth too big for his mouth, but there was a challenge in his voice and the smile was just a twitch of his lips. “I wouldn’t stir that Anaïs’s pot for nothing. From what I hear, she ain’t exactly a woman. Maybe she’s even a rezu like Gabriela. Maybe you like that, huh?”

His mouth twitched again. Snowflakes hit the incisors and expired.

I didn’t like being with Masa when he had a weapon. After all, Masa was that rare animal on Mictlan: a killer.

Masa had murdered Kiichi Koda-Schmidt back in 96, shooting him in the leg and then bludgeoning the crippled man repeatedly with a convenient hunk of shale until his face was an unrecognizable pulp. Evidently, the two had argued while out hunting, and the argument had turned both physical and deadly. Old Anaïs, Ana’s Geema, had been judge for the trial. No one was much surprised that Masa had killed someone, nor that Kiichi was the one dead—both men had demonstrated evil tempers in the past, and neither had demonstrated any inclination to control them. No one was even appalled by the lame excuse Masa trotted out—the quarrel had begun when he and Kiichi couldn’t decide who was going to eat the last bit of sugarpaste in their packs, and Kiichi (Masa claimed) had tried to brain Masa with the same rock first; they’d also both been roaring drunk when the fight started,

People have been killed for poorer reasons, I suppose, and Masa seemed genuinely remorseful afterward, though that was no doubt small comfort to Kiichi or the Koda-Schmidt family.

If the triteness of the reason for Kiichi’s murder wasn’t enough, what really pissed off old Anaïs was that Masa had left behind the game they’d killed, choosing to lug back Kiichi’s body instead.

“It wasn’t enough to kill a man,” she told him, and her anger honed the voice until it cut. “You had to see if you could starve a few of us at the same time. You’re not only violent, you’re stupid.”

Had Kiichi been a woman, Masa might have been summarily executed for the murder—there being no excuse for that level of stupidity. But Kiichi was a male, and thus not overly valuable. Instead, Anaïs had declared Masa shunned for five years.

Shunned. The word itself made me shiver. I can’t imagine the isolation one of the Shunned must feel. For five years Masa performed field work. For five years, all his communal and conjugal privileges were revoked. For five years, no one—under penalty of being shunned themselves—would even speak to him or acknowledge his presence except when absolutely necessary. He was given just enough food to survive, and had to live apart from all the Families, in the caves near the river.

For five years, Masa was alone, exiled in the midst of the Families.

Being shunned could drive people crazy. Kees Allen-Levin had been shunned for two years for stealing food. During SixthMonth, he walked to the summit of the Rock. There, with only the Miccail stelae to see, he’d thrown himself from the high cliffs. Samuel Koda-Schmidt had vanished into the wilderness before his shunning was over; Lynnèa Martinez-Santos had been shunned for only six months, but afterward, she was never the same and died within a year.

And Gabriela Rusack, the first one ever shunned, and shunned not once but twice...well, that’s a tale we all know, a cautionary fairy tale told to children from their infancy.

In the year since the restoration of his position, Masa had been in a few altercations, but they’d been empty-handed affairs, none serious enough to cause the Families to ask old Anaïs to shim him once more. Still, no one—not even his Family—wanted to be around Masa alone. Wangari Koda-Shimmura had started a pool to see when he’d finally step over the line again.

I didn’t particularly want to be the reason to change Masa’s status quo—definitely not when the man was armed.

“Nei. You’re my role model, Masa. Didn’t you know that?” I grinned back at Masa, and left him to chew on that—I figured it would take him a while to work it out and see if it came out to an insult.

We were sweeping the fields near Rusack’s Trail for grumblers. After the attack on Euzhan and the way the grumbler came at Anaïs and me, a lot of people were understandably paranoid about the creatures, and Kim-Li Allen-Levin had spied a mating pair of them prowling the fields this morning; Johanna, her Family’s matriarch, had insisted that the grumblers needed to be chased away or killed, especially since this was a Gather night. No one argued with her, not even Dominic. We’ve all seen how quickly Mictlan’s creatures can change.

The Family Elders tell tales of the redwings filling the sky each autumn; it used to be their sign that it was time to begin the harvest. Now, barely seventy-five years later, redwings are rare. When I was born, there were summer bloomings of piercing white blossoms on the sweetmelon vines along the edges of Tlilipan, and they always swarmed with small, electric-blue curltongues, lapping at the flowers with their long, namesake feature. Now the curltongues ignore the sweetmelons, preferring instead the midges clouding the air above the black water. And we’ve all seen how the land barnacles changed their patterns from bright purple to stone brown in the course of less than a decade, as soon as they decided to infest the compounds rather than the trees around us.

For that matter, snow had usually been pale yellow until six or seven years ago; now it is more often this iron-oxide red. That’s just a few examples. Anyone could give you a dozen others. Nothing on Mictlan stays the same for very long. Nature seemed to have gunned the twin motors of mutation and evolution here. Grumblers suddenly turning aggressive?—it wasn’t much of a leap.

So we plowed on between the rows of faux-wheat, dusting ourselves with colored snow.

We spotted grumbler spoor about ten minutes later: brown-black droppings near a crumpled section of wheat. Masa crouched alongside the scat and carefully prodded the nearest mound with a wheat stalk. The stalk went in easily, and as soon as the surface was broken, the khudda steamed.

“Fresh,” Masa grunted. “The sons of bitches are right here.” He straightened, looking at the lines of wheat. We both saw the line of crumpled stalks at the same time, not twenty paces ahead. The grumblers had pushed through the row down which we were walking, heading toward the river. The stalks were rising back up as we watched. “Right fucking here,” Masa repeated in a hoarse whisper. He unshouldered his rifle and checked the chamber. The metal bolt snapped back into place with a oiled, sharp clack-clack. I checked my own weapon, remembering the way the grumbler had come at Anaïs, remembering the way the beast had torn Euzhan open.

We followed the trail.

The grumblers must have been moving fast, probably scenting us in the field. The knot in my stomach loosened slightly—that was typical grumbler cowardice. With any luck, we’d find that they’d hit open ground and bolted for the cover of the forest.

We weren’t graced with that kind of luck. I came out of the wheat field a few steps ahead of Masa. The grumblers had halted out in the strip of open meadow between the field and the river trees. It was snowing harder, and I blinked into the bloody flurries. The grumblers were staring back at me, a female and her pup, with the mam making the standard mumbling challenge as I emerged, though she was still backing away as she growled and chittered in my direction, pulling her youngster with her. Kim-Li had said there were three of them, but it looked like daddy had already taken off.

Masa came huffing out of the field about then. “Khudda,” he said when he saw the two, and his rifle snapped up. I pushed the barrel up and over before he could squeeze the trigger. “Hey!” Masa shouted. “What the fuck—”

“There’s no need to kill them,” I said. “They’re leaving. Let them go.”

“You’re joking.”

I still had hold of his rifle. “I said, we let them go if they want to go. Fire a few shots in the air if you want to get them moving, but I don’t see any need to kill them.”

“You still say that after what happened to Euzhan?”

The female grumbler was still backing, still facing us, her deadlocked chin—longer than the male’s—wagging with the motion. She pushed the child in back of her with her hand, and the gesture looked no different than something we might have done, trying to protect the children from some threat. “Hai,” I told him. “I still say that.”

“Then let go of my rifle.”

I let go. Masa put the stock on his shoulder, the barrel pointed up at the ruddy clouds over the grumblers’ heads; I should have known, but before I could move, Masa brought the rifle down sharply, his finger coiling around the trigger. The female went down in a heap with the explosive report of the shot. Masa laughed. “Damn it, Masa!” I shouted.

Daddy grumbler came hurtling out from behind us, howling. He hit Masa from behind, cloth tearing as the beast’s claws dug into his coat, and both of them went down, the grumbler tumbling as it hit the icy ground. Masa’s rifle went flying somewhere off into the swirling snow. Masa shook his head, groggy; the grumbler was already on his feet.

I shot him. He went down with a hard thud. The youngling grumbler was howling now, snarling and hissing near the body of its mother.

There was a third shot, and the pup crumpled, silent. I looked at Masa, who’d recovered his rifle. He cocked his head toward me, still sighting down the barrel. “‘They’re leaving,’” he said mockingly. “‘Let them go.’ I’ll be sure to remember that, Elio, next time.”

Masa’s face, twisted and distorted in fear and distaste as he looked down at the body of the grumbler, reminded me of something...someone...For a long time, I couldn’t think of where I’d seen that look before. Then, as he grimaced and turned away from the carnage, his eyes narrowed and hard, I knew.

His was the look Dominic had worn this morning when we talked about Anaïs: the same unfocused anger, the same loathing of the unknown, of the different.

Table of Contents

- Section 1: The Snake
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- The Web Part I
- Section 2: The Child
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- The Web Part II
- Section 3. The Dance Of Fire
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- The Web Part III
- Section 4: The Immortals
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9

- THE CHILDREN STAR – (Excerpt) The Elysium Cycle Book 3

- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE

- BRAIN PLAGUE – (Excerpt) The Elysium Cycle Book 4

- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE

- HALFWAY HUMAN - Excerpt

- Prologue
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three

- DARK WATER'S EMBRACE - Excerpt

- Discoveries