Introduction

This book is an anthology of new stories set within a single conceptual framework, pro-duced jointly by a group of science-fiction writers—a kind of collective enterprise that is known in the world of science-fiction publishing as a “shared-world” anthology. Many such shared-world volumes have been released in recent years. What is special about this one, is that all the writers involved in creating it were winners of science fic-tion’s highest award of professional excellence, the Nebula. Never before has a group of Nebula winners been brought together to apply their very diverse talents to exploring the same set of ideas and characters.

Science-fiction writers are notoriously individualistic in their private lives, political positions, and professional demeanor. It’s a field richly populated by lone wolves, lib-ertarians, nonconformists of every stripe. They tend to think their own thoughts and go their own way. Most of them resist editorial tinkering with their work and are usually unhappy in the fundamentally collaborative atmosphere of a place like Hollywood, where writers are (rightly) consid-ered to be nothing more than members of a large team, and not very important members of the team at that.

How very strange, then, that this collection of cantan-kerous individualists would have embraced with such en-thusiasm the collectivist concept of the shared-world anthology. To work with other people’s ideas—to volunteer for positions in what are essentially round-robin novels written by many hands—to take pains to make certain that their contributions to these books don’t violate the previ-ously determined conceptual boundaries of the project—it seems the tithesis of individualism in every way. And yet throughout the history of the science-fiction field such shared-world projects have attracted some of the most tal-ented writers of each period.

One of the most famous of these joint enterprises was hatched in the earliest days of science fiction as a special-ized form in the United States. This was the seventeen-part serial novel Cosmos, which was published in 1933 and 1934.

The contributors to Cosmos were the top-ranking pro-fessional science-fiction writers of the era.

The roster in-cluded some authors whose names today are nothing more than trivia-contest items—Abner J. Gelula, Bob Olsen, Francis Flagg, J. Harvey Haggard. But also we find, among those who turned out the monthly Cosmos chapters, such titans of science fiction and fantasy as John W.

Campbell, Jr., E. E. Smith, Ph.D., A. Merritt, and Edmond Hamilton, who wrote the spectacular final chapter, “Armageddon in Space.”

Cosmos was a romp, a spoof, an exercise in sheer science-fictional playfulness, tremendous fun for writers and readers alike. But the next shared-world project that comes to mind was a very serious endeavor indeed.

This was a volume called The Petrified Planet, pub-lished in 1952, for which the scientist John D.

Clark worked out the chemical and biological specifications of a planet where the basic element of life was silicone, rather than carbon as it is on Earth, and three outstanding writers of the time were invited to contribute novellas based on Dr. Clark’s technical data. The results were outstanding: a trio of stories that bore no relationship to one another in plot, character, or theme, and yet grew organically out of the same set of scientific postulates.

Other shared-world books followed, over the years. The most remarkable such project of this sort, I think, was Harlan Ellison’s epochal Medea, which was published in 1985 after a ten-year gestation period. It was Ellison’s bril-liant idea to create a science-fictional planet by a three-stage process: first, some of the field’s top idea-men would produce essays setting forth the astrophysics, geology, bi-ology, oceanography, and even the politics and theology of the hypothetical world. Then four other writers would be handed the booklets containing all this information and would go on stage (during a series of major science-fiction seminars held before a general-public audience at the Uni-versity of California, Los Angeles), in an attempt to improvise plot structures for stories set on this world; and, finally, a group of writers including all of the earlier crea-tors would, be asked to do the actual stories.

Ellison used a formidable cast of major figures to bring Medea into existence. The underlying specifications were drawn up by no less a team than Hal Clement, Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl, and Poul Anderson. The quartet of intrepid writers who improvised story ideas before a huge audience at UCLA included Frank Herbert, Theodore Sturgeon, Tho—mas M. Disch, and Robert Silverberg. The stories for the book were written by Messrs. Niven, Anderson, Pohl, Clement, Sturgeon, Herbert, Silverberg, and Disch, plus Jack Williamson, Kate Wilhelm, and editor Ellison himself. Many of the stories, first published separately, became Hugo and Nebula nominees, and at least one won an award. The book was an extraordinary achievement, fascinating and unique. Even where the writers strayed from the spec-ifications, contradicted one another, created variations on the theme that grew from their own distinctive literary per-sonalities rather than from the preset concepts, that in itself was significantly interesting. If Medea were the only ex-ample of such collaborative science fiction ever to have been conceived, it would by itself have justified the notion of the worth of collective activity of that kind.

Many other shared-world projects have followed it—a few of them ingeniously and coherently devised, others less impressive. In the main, a great deal of notable work has been done in these joint enterprises over the years. Which brings us back to the paradox I put forth on the first page of this introduction. Why are science-fiction writers, so deeply individualistic in so many ways, willing and even eager to take part in these projects, in which they have to subordinate their own creative impulses to some editor’s a priori notion of what they should be writing, or, even worse, some committee’s ideas?

The answer, I think, lies in their love of a good chal-lenge. Of course, any good science-fiction writer would rather work from his own ideas than anyone else’s, and, most of the time, that’s what they do. But there’s an ele-ment of sport—of risk, even—in being handed a prospectus and asked to fit one’s own literary personality into precon-ceived modes and structures. And too, there’s the aspect of expressing one’s creativity within the preconceived structures, by reinterpreting them, by txansfonning, by ex-(aiding, by stretching the boundaries of what’s been given. That’s what I meant when I said, in speaking of Medea, that one of the book’s many fascinations lay in seeing where and how some of the writers had deviated from the plan. Any hack can produce a lifeless imitative work-to-order; the test of a real writer is to breathe individuality and vigor into a story even though the original creative impulse for it came from someone else.

Which brings us to the book you now are reading.

Fifteen years have gone by since the unforgettable night when Tom Disch, Frank Herbert, Ted Sturgeon, Har-lan Ellison, and I spent hours in front of that huge UCLA audience working out variations on the Medea concepts that Fred Pohl, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, and Hal Clement had invented for us. Sturgeon and Herbert are dead now; Medea itself is out of print, a collector’s item, for a tangle of reasons as inexplicable as they are regrettable, though I understand that a reissue is finally in the works.

One after-noon in 1988, while we were attending the Nebula Award ceremonies of the Science Fiction Writers of America in Los Angeles, Martin H. Greenberg and I came up with the notion of trying to produce a new book that might come close to matching the scope and depth of Ellison’s main-moth anthology: this time as an official project of the SFWA.

For Medea, Harlan had invited a de facto elite of sci-ence fiction: a group of writers whose accomplishments over many years had made them plausible candidates for such a book. For the new volume, we chose to limit the roster of potential contributors to an elite also, but not sim-ply a de facto one. Since this was to be an official publi-cation of the. Science Fiction Writers of America, the ranking professional organization of the field, the only writ-ers who would be invited to take part would be those who had won the Nebula Award that the SFWA presents each year to the writers of the previous year’s four best stories and novels, as chosen by vote of the membership.

That gave us a considerable potential roster. Since the inauguration of the Nebulas in 1966, something like fifty writers have received the gleaming Lucite trophies. Invi-tations went out to all fifty.

Some replied categorically that they never took part in shared-world projects; a few told us that they regarded themselves as fantasy/horror writers and found writing this kind of science fiction uncongenial; some said they were too busy with projects of their own at the time; others offered reactions ranging from the conditional to the enthusiastic. And, one way and another, we win-nowed the list down to the group who produced the present volume.

To construct the underlying specifications we chose two veterans of Medea’s formative days, Poul Anderson and Frederik Pohl. Poul worked up a brilliant design for the double-world Murasaki System and sent his rough draft to Fred, who came back with suggestions of his own; then Fred produced an essay on the probable cultural traits of the Murasaki planets’ denizens, and much else. (The orig-inal Anderson and Pohl specification essays are reproduced as an appendix to this volume, by way of showing the rich-ness and depth of the material that underlies the stories. If you want to experience this book the way the authors of the stories did, I suggest that you turn to the appendix first, read the essays by Anderson and Pohl, then go to the fic-tion. You’d be wise to read the stories in the order they appear in the book, from that point on, unless you really enjoy challenges.) Once the Anderson-Pohl conceptualizations had reached their final form, I wrote a “primary scenario,” five or six pages long, setting out some fundamental narrative structures that would provide the

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book as much unity as a novel written by six different writers is likely to have. There’s no need to reprint that scenario in full here: the six writers have put flesh on its bones with admirable skill. But perhaps a few brief extracts will give some notion of how one goes about the planning of a book of this sort:

“The basic notion is to build the book around two patterns of opposition: rational-minded humans vs. spiri-tualists, and the alien natives of Genii vs. their counterparts on Chujo.. . . “

“The first level of conflict is between the two batches of Earth-critters—the science-y types on Genji, and the New Age sorts on or around Chujo. Each group detests the other and is miserably afraid that the other will spoil its party.

“Of course, some kind of synthesis has to come out of all this eventually: a compromise between the Earth fac-tions and a blending of the two alien cultures. What it will be, I have to leave to the writers of the final stories. My only stipulation is that it ought to be reasonably positive—that is, I don’t want the book to be one huge demonstration of the thesis that the wisest way to approach intelligent alien species is not to approach them at all. . . .

And then the fat package of preliminary material went off to the writers. Fred. Pohl wrote the first story: Pout An-derson did the second. They were the two guys, after all, who understood Chujo and Genji better than anyone in the universe, and we wanted them to establish through vivid narratives what these planets were really like. Then the growing bundle of manuscript was forwarded to Greg Ben-ford, who did the next story, and David Brin, who did the one after that. Greg Bear provided the fifth story, and Nancy Kress heroically drew the whole project together with the sixth and climactic one.

And there you are: the first shared-world anthology conceived and written entirely by Nebula Award winners. As you’ll see when you read the appended essays, even these six top-flight writers didn’t begin to exhaust the back-ground material from which they worked; we could all go on writing Chujo/Genji stories for many years to come. Perhaps some of us will. Perhaps there will be other books of this sort.

But such projects are a matter for the future. Here we offer you your first glimpse of the Murasaki Sys-tem. Our deepest hope now is that Chujo and Genji will become as real to you as you read it as they did to us during the intricate process of assembling the book.

—Robert Silverberg, Oakland, California, September 1990

The Treasures Of Chujo

by Frederik Pohl

1

One of the advantages of Aaron Kammer’s situation—there weren’t many of them—was that he didn’t have to worry about unpleasant surprises. There weren’t likely to be many more of those for him, either. Ever. Kammer’s situation was what the old physi-cist, Richard Feynman, called a stable system.

Feynman said stability was what you got when all the fast things had happened, and all the slow things hadn’t happened yet.

In that sense, all of the Spacer ship that was exploring the Murasaki planets was in a stable state, at least up to the moment when the first message carne in from the approach-ing Japanese expedition.

Earlier, there had been plenty of fast things happening. There had been the building of the ship and the recruiting of the crew—all of them, from Spacer habitats all over the solar system and even from Mars, like Kammer himself. There had been the launch, the long acceleration, the accident with the drive at turnaround (very fast things happening then, and very serious for Aaron Kammer—not to mention for the three crew mem-bers who weren’t even as lucky as Kammer, but just died). Then there had been the arrival at the star, Murasaki, and the dispatch of exploration parties to the planet Genji and, yes, there also had been a great many personally fast things among the crew, such as their repeated epi-sodes of divorces and remarriages, and re-divorces and re-remarriages, as the accumulated boredoms and hostilities of the eleven years of interstellar flight took their toll.

There had also been some other things that had been, really, fast enough for anybody, by any objective measurement—the ship had attained velocities fairly close to the speed of light on the long trip from Earth’s system to Murasaki’s, and certainly that has to be called fast— although they hadn’t seemed fast at all while they were happening. (Four thousand time-dilated days! Long enough to seem an eternity to the nineteen surviving peo-ple who had been crammed into each other’s personal space for all that time.)

At any rate, the ship had finally arrived safely. More or less safely, anyway, not counting the fact that Aaron Kammer was still slowly dying and the three other casu-alties had already accomplished the process. So all those fast things had happened. Now ship and crew were in the stable.state of waiting for the slow things to happen.

There were a lot of those slow things that hadn’t hap-pened yet, even if you didn’t get into the very slow ones, like the dimming of the sun or the heat-death of the uni-verse. One of those moderately slow things would be completing the exploration of the Chujo-Genji system. An-other—for those who lived to do it—would be going back to Earth...and, in Aaron ICammer’s case, there was always that ongoing slow thing that was highly important to him. Namely the very slow, but not slow enough, process of finishing the business of becoming dead.

Then the ship’s radio announced an incoming call on the hailing frequency, and it was the Japanese.

Aaron Kammer was tethered in the control room when it came, nominally occupied in monitoring the incoming picture transmissions from Genji’s starside. He hadn’t ex-pected any calls on the hailing frequency, there twenty-some light-years from Earth. He certainly hadn’t expected them from strangers.

When the blast of Japanese language came over the speaker he jumped and jabbed himself with the needle in his hand. The only other person in the room was the captain, half drowsing over his autobridge board like a huge four-limbed pumpkin. Captain Darryl Washing-ton had a different reaction. He lunged for the radio, slap-ping his game board across the room, and brayed, “Cut it out, Nicole! Use your lander frequency, if that’s you.”

There wasn’t any answer. The captain glared accus-ingly at Kammer. Kammer, sucking his finger, shrugged. It would have been quite like Nicole to try to startle them, if she was in fact in space on her way back to the ship. But keeping track of Nicole wasn’t his job—wasn’t even, any longer, his right.

In theory, Kammer was on duty. He was supervising the ship’s instruments as they scanned one more track of Genji’s surface, adding false-color optics and magnetome-ter readings to the maps they had been building up ever since they arrived. It was the kind of job you gave to some-body who wasn’t healthy enough to go down to the surface of Genji, since the instruments didn’t actually need any supervision at all. What Kammer was mostly doing was sewing a bonnet for Bandit, his ex-wife Nicole’s old seal point cat.

“Hey, Nicole!” the captain called, now really irri-tated. “I’m talking to you!” And, turning to give Kammer another accusing look, as though it were his fault: “She’s supposed to stay in radio contact on the ascent!”

Kammer didn’t respond. He bent back to his sewing, because he hoped to finish it before Nicole arrived. The fact that Aaron Kammer was making clothes for his ex-wife’s cat didn’t mean that he was loopy—well, certainly it didn’t mean that among the crew of the starship, most of whom had found hobbies a good deal weirder over the long years of the trip. Kammer was doing it because he didn’t have much else to do, since Boulat Kotsvili, the ship’s main medic, refused to pass him as fit for a Genji mission ... and also because he was fond of the cat... and also, to be sure, because he kept hoping wistfully that his ex-wife, Ni-cole, would once again divorce her once and present hus-band, the captain, and marry him again, if only for a little while before he died. Kammer was biologically thirty-two years old (though the birth certificate back on Mars said he had been born more than forty years ago), and unlikely ever to reach thirty-five. (That was because of the dying thing: he and the other casualties should have been more careful while they were changing the antimatter thruster block at the midcourse turnaround.) As he sewed the pretty little bonnet to put on his ex-wife’s cat, he was tethered so that he wouldn’t float away in the microgravity of Low Genji Orbit. He was completely absorbed in making the stitches neat and small, and Captain Blow-Your-Horn’s yelling an-noyed him. (Loud noises sometimes sent Kammer into con-vulsions these days.)

There were only three of the crew left in the big terstellar ship—Boulat Kotsvili asleep in his room—though a fourth was supposed to be en route up from Genji. That was the missing Nicole, who was bringing a sick fifth per-son back in the landing craft. Everybody else was hard at work on the surface of Genji, doing what they had come all this way to do. Aaron Kammer thought of them often, and with a lot of envy. Even though the sick Murcihad Fasbar was coughing his lungs out, the result of having tried to talk unprotected to the Ihrdizu at sea level, and the people still in the base camp on the high plain were bitter about the biting winds and the miserable cold—even though existence on Genji was perilous and nasty—that was where he should have been.

With, of course, Nicole.

Then the hailing radio spoke again.

It was a woman’s voice this time, but definitely it was not Nicole. “Hello, Spacer ship,– it said—I’m Manae Na-kahishi, and we just wanted to let ‘you know you’ll have company in about twenty-two days.”

The captain swung himself around in his harness, pant-ing at the effort of moving all that fat around, to stare at Aaron Kammer again. This time his look wasn’t angry. it was depressed. “Oh, hell,” he said.

“The Japs have caught up with us.”

Kammer took his finger out of his mouth and looked at it. It had stopped bleeding. “That’s too bad,”

he called to the man he had nicknamed Captain Blow-Your-Horn.

“I didn’t expect them for years yet,” the captain grumbled. Kammer didn’t answer that, because it was ob-vious. The spacers knew when the Japanese had launched their Murasaki ship, and they knew very well, none better, how long it took to make Murasaki orbit, having done it themselves. It was an unpleasant shock to find their com-petitors arriving early. The captain scowled and ordered Kammer,

“Go wake Boulat up.”

“He’s awake already,” Kammer pointed out, because the state-of-the-ship telltale on the wall was

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already flashing to show that Boulat Kotsvili’s door was opening. “Darryl? Maybe you should call Nicole to let her know what’s hap-pening, if she’s already on her way.”

“I am trying to call her! Don’t get all in a flap, Kam-mer,” the captain ordered, waving his sausagey arms. “Do something useful, why don’t you? Go change the cat box!”

If Kammer did as he was ordered, it wasn’t because he respected the captain’s authority. Captain Blow-Your-Horn didn’t have any f that. It wasn’t in the hope of the captain’s appreciation, either, because there was no hope that the captain would ever like Aaron Kammer. Especially since the captain knew exactly how much Kammer wanted the return of their intermittently exchanged wife. Now that the captain was captain, after their real captain died in the same shower of radiation that was still killing Kammer, Darryl (“Blow-Your-Horn”) Washington regarded Kam-mer’s coveting of Nicole as something near mutiny.

Given a choice, Kammer would have preferred that the captain like him. It wasn’t that he had any high opinion of old Blow-Your-Horn, it was only that Kammer wanted to be missed when he died. The only people around in a po-sition to do that for him, now, were the people in the Spacer ship, because certainly no one they had left behind in Earth’s solar system cared any more. They were all for-gotten there as individuals by now. And Kammer couldn’t be mourned by his own original wife, Priss, the one he had come aboard with in the co-Ceres orbit long ago. That wife had been killed in the same accident that was still killing him—although, to be sure, she’d diyorced him before that, anyway.

Kammer would be dead for a long time, he knew—that was one of the really slow things—and he liked to think that when he went all the survivors of the crew would mourn him, and speak fondly of him, and wish he were still alive. Even the captain.

Time was when Aaron Kammer had been one of the most important members of the ship’s crew, the head drive engineer, on whom the safety of every one of them rested. People respected him then, and the women looked on him with interest. Especially Darryl Washington’s pretty brown-haired wife.

Since the accident with the thrust block, that time was over. Now that the ship was merely rolling around Genji in its one-hundred-minute orbit, the important people were the downside exploration crews. Time would come when the ship would turn around and head back to Earth with all the readings and films they had taken and hadn’t had bandwidth to transmit completely back to Earth, and its freezers full of precious biological samples. But even then, Kammer wouldn’t be important again. It was Kam-mer’s backup who would have to be the engineer in charge on that long flight, because Kammer himself would not be alive.

He shivered. In spite of all his practice at it, he didn’t like thinking about how he would be dead. But what was interstellar flight, in the first place, but a form of cut-rate su-icide? You didn’t really end your life; you just threw away about a quarter:of it on your interminable trip. It wasn’t an accident that four of the original crew had had histories of attempted suicide. When the screening board first began in-terviewing volunteers they had set pretty high, standards for mental stability, but they had had to cut them back. Really stable people didn’t volunteer to go to Murasaki.

But some people didn’t have much choice. Like Kam-mer. When you were born on Mars you had the worst of all worlds. Poorer than Earth or space, not much in the way of natural resources; when the chance came to move to a space habitat you jumped at it, and when the chance came along to try your luck at an interstellar mission you took that, too.

Even though you knew what the cost would be.

So Kammer thought; and was glad to be interrupted when the cat, Bandit, sprang out of hiding and landed on his shoulder, rubbing up against his ear.

Nicole’s Siamese had come aboard with all the others when the ship was launched. That was a long time ago. In those days Bandit had been a kitten, and the captain (who wasn’t yet the captain) had been an energetic (and even thin) young space volunteer, doting on his young bride and tolerating her peccadilloes—that was, of course, before she became Aaron’s bride, and then took another turn at being the captain’s after Aaron got sick. Bandit was an old cat now. But when you thought of it that was one of her fringe benefits for going star-wandering, because if she had stayed in the habitats she would have been long since dead; it was only the relativistic time dilation of their trip out that kept her still going.

Changing Bandit’s box wasn’t particularly distasteful work. Kammer didn’t have to comb the turds out to dispose of them, because there wasn’t any place to dispose them to, anyway. All he did was take the metal tray out of its screened enclosure (screened because otherwise, in their microgravity environment, the cat would have scratched sand and excrement all over the ship) and put it in, the high-temperature oven to turn everything back to a sanitary state. The vapors, of course, were sucked into the recycling tank, along with all the other stinks and scraps the crew of the ship produced each day.

It didn’t take long.

When it was done Kammer picked up the tray with gloved hands and set it back in its cage. The cat was crouched beside him now, waiting for the chance to soil the pristine sand. “Not yet, Bandit,—Kammer warned. “Let it cool off.” That wasn’t necessary. Bandit knew very well that hot sand would scorch her paws, because she’d had a lifetime to learn.

Just to make sure, Kammer picked her up and stroked her while he waited. He was glad to see that his finger showed no sign of beginning to bleed again. That was, good. Blood was one of the things he couldn’t spare, not as long as his blood cells kept dying and the rejection rate kept getting worse each, time he was transfused_

Dying wasn’t just a slow thing. It was a hard thing, and he wasn’t very good at it.

Of course, everyone knew there would be a Japanese ship along one of these days. It wasn’t only inevitable, it was, really, quite fair. It had been the Japanese who had first, probed the Murasaki System and found that it had two habitable (well, more or less habitable) planets. For more than a year after the spacers had sneaked their own hastily built ship into launch orbit, the crew had been subjected to furious recriminations coming over the radio every day from the Japanese.

Fairness didn’t count, though. No one owned the star Murasaki and its planets. Even the Japanese didn’t question that, though they’d named the system and fully expected to be the first to explore it in person. They only thought it was a dirty trick for the spacers to fit an interstellar drive onto one of their ships and send it off, while the Earth-bound Japanese themselves were still completing designs for the one they intended to build for the job.

All the same, Kammer was a little sorry that the Jap-anese ship was so close.

He thought about going back to the control room to talk it over with Darryl and Boulat Kotsvili—he could hear their voices down the hall. But he felt a quick jolt as he held the, cat, and knew what that meant. The lander had docked.

He wanted to see Nicole, too, of course. He always did. But he hadn’t finished maldng Bandies little bonnet so that Nicole could, so charmingly, play baby-dress-up with the cat in place of the real baby she wasn’t likely ever to have. Anyway, when he did finish the hat, he wanted to give it to Nicole in private.

So Kammer did what he did more and more of the time these days. He pulled himself quietly to his own room, closed the door and his eyes, and went peacefully to sleep....

Awakening only in surprise when a sudden discon-certing rocking pressure against the straps that held him told him that the ship’s drive was on. They were moving the big ship out of Low Genji Orbit!

Another fast thing was happening, and a wholly unexpected one.

2

When an outside intrusion (as, for instance, the early arrival of their Japanese competitors) perturbs a stable system (like Captain Blow-Your-Horn’s ship), the system doesn’t stay stable. Then all sorts of fast things begin to happen all at once. The captain was expe-riencing several of them.

The captain’s name wasn’t really Blow-Your-Horn, of course, but only Darryl Washington. The unwelcome nick-name was just one of the reasons the captain disliked Aaron Kammer. He didn’t really need reasons. Darryl Washington had once been a reasonably amiable human being, but after living intimately among the other adventurers for the last interminable time-dilated decade, he didn’t like any of them very much. Murqhad Fasbar, before he went down to the surface of Genji and got sick, had got into a roaring match with the captain once. (That was one of the reasons why he had left for Genji the next day.) In the course of it, Fasbar had told the whole ship, at the top of his voice, that Darryl Washington was not only disgracefully fat but a fun-damentally insecure person. That was why, he was so hostile all the time, Fasbar shouted, and the insecurity was the result of his unexpectedly having inherited the captaincy when the real captain died, so that Washington simply didn’t allow himself to like or trust anyone at all.

Of course, that was nonsense. At least, Washington himself was almost certain it was. Washington knew per-fectly well why he didn’t like his crew. They didn’t deserve to be liked, because they were a pack of undisciplined dip-shits. They didn’t respect his position. Anyway, he told himself, just to set the record straight in his mind, he did like some people—he was sure of that—particularly his wife, now that she had come back from her stupid escapade of marrying that particularly undisciplined dipshit, Aaron Kammer, for a while. Washington demonstrated that fact to himself as soon as the lander docked, by throwing his arms around her and whispering into her ear. But, being who he was, before he kissed her, he accused, “You should’ve been in radio contact coming up here!”

She pulled back and looked at him. “How could I? I was busy trying to keep Murqhad alive.” She looked like hell, he thought. Her face was pinched and lean. “I thought if we got him to the high plain he’d be all right, but—” She shook her head.

It was time for a loving husband to be forgiving, Washington realized, so he kissed her ear tenderly.

‘‘Yes, fine,” she said, distractedly releasing herself, “but won’t you help me get Murqhad to bed? The fool thought he could go out without a suit, and he’s wrecked his stupid lungs.”

“Poor guy,” Washington said with satisfaction. “Come on, Boulat, give Nicole a hand.” He watched crit-ically as the two of them helped the wheezing, coughing Murqhad Fasbar to his own room—another nasty little nui-sance to put up with, Washington told himself. They’d be listening to those hacking coughing fits all over the ship. Nicole did look a little thinner, he thought critically, watch ing her. She had kept herself slim all through the flight—while he, like so many Spacers, had just let the kilograms pile on—but she still had a warmly curved, still-attractive figure. He was pleased about that, since he expected very soon to have the pleasure of experiencing it.

When they were gone, Washington strapped himself back in at the control board. He wasn’t planning to do any-ing, special there; it was just the right place for a captain to be. Washington reviewed his conduct for the last few mo-ments and was satisfied. It was, he thought, just about what his hero would have done.

Darryl Washington’s hero wasn’t a real, live human be-ing. He wasn’t even a dead one. The person Washington most admired was a fictitious character from the works of an almost forgotten twentieth-century novelist, and the character’s name (which; regrettably, was the source of Washington’s un-desired nickname) was Horatio Hornblower.

As a boy in the cis-Mercurian solar-power habitat where Washington had grown up, he had fed his childish fantasies with such heroic books. Kipling, Homer, Percival Christopher Wren—all the great old stories about people who traveled far to do great things, and always knew just what to do. Young Darryl had read every one of the Hornblower disks before he was twelve. That was why he had wanted so badly to be some kind of captain when he grew up.

And then, without warning, he was—when, halfway to Murasaki, the accident with the antimatter drive had killed the real captain.

Nothing is ever as good as its anticipation, is it?

Oh, there were good things about it. There was the thrilling, not to say shocking, discovery that even the old captain had not been absolutely honest with the crew, be-cause there were “sealed orders”

(Washington liked to think of them as that) that the captain had never even hinted at. But they were a real problem. Washington was not at all sure he wanted to carry them out. And the captaincy itself wasn’t nearly as good as he had thought it would be. What was a captain now, in these soft times? Nothing! The kind of things a captain had to do were mostly just plain boring—absurd, petty things like checking the leaders of the planet parties to make sure everybody was keeping up his steroids and calcium intake; riding herd on Boulat Kots-vili to ensure that all the women were using their fertility blockers; nagging the supply chiefs in every downside party so no one would forget to keep their reserve supplies up—and not run out of medicines, say, or food supplements. Horatio Hornblower had it easy. And worst of all, from Captain Washington’s point of view, people argued with him!

It had been a lot different with Horatio Homblower.

When the first Hornblower gave an order, everybody jumped to do it. They had to. He could hang them from the yardarm if they didn’t. The only thing Homblower had to worry about was making sure he gave the right order, and that was easy enough to do (in Darryl Washington’s opinion) if only everybody else around would just shut up and obey.

For Washington himself, it was different. What he was forced to do was to give only the orders that people would be willing to obey ... and what was the fun of that?

To be sure, there were a lot of ways in which Captain Darryl Washington’s situation was a good deal more inter-esting than that of the mythical Captain Horatio Horn-blower. Crew, for instance. A sailing-ship captain like Homblower was lucky if a quarter of his crew could read or write, while the people under Washington’s –command–included specialists in linguistics, petrology, archaeology (with a minor in theology), plant chemistry, sociology, zo-ology, and a dozen other—ologies and—isticses.

(They hadn’t all been expert in all those things at launch time—but it isn’t hard to earn double doctorates in eleven years of monotony.) Washington didn’t think of that. Wouldn’t have considered it much of a break if he had, because all it meant was that they had a lot more ammunition to use in challenging his decisions.

Washington glowered around the control room, as though quelling a rebellious crew. Of course, they weren’t there. Boulat and Nicole were caring for the sick man, Kammer was doing, whatever he did when he wasn’t in view—Captain Blow-Your-Horn didn’t much care; it was just good to have him out of sight. Still the captain, in his own control room, felt the inaudible sound of them snick-ering at him.

There was, a better place to be, where no one ever questioned his authority. Captain Washington set all the controls on automatic, unstrapped himself, and, wheezing with the effort of pulling his monstrously fat body through the corridors, went there.

The chamber that Darryl Washington had comman-deered for his private office wasn’t large, but it was a great luxury. When he locked the door, he was a real captain. Supreme in his own domain, it was the kind of luxury no one on the spacer ship had been able to possess for all the subjective eleven years of their flight.

Once it had been storage space. Storage space was what most of the interior cubage of the ship was: room to hold the huge quantity of things that were necessary for exploring the new planets. like the two scouting planes, four of the six wire-wheeled surface buggies, the food ma-chines, the camping equipment, two or three lander loads of trade goods to win friends among the natives. Those things were all gone now, painfully ferried down to the surface of Genji. Their storage space was empty. The ship now had surplus room. Anyone of the crew remaining on the ship who wanted it could appropriate a compartment of his own, and put a door on it, and lock it.

Naturally, everyone had immediately done so. Every-one had dreamed for years of the joy of possessing a per-sonal place to scratch or pick one’s nose or break wind in private. Washington, as captain, had asserted his right to first pick, of course. The only real difference was that Dar-ryl Washington still used the locks... for that was the kind of person Captain Blow-Your-Horn was.

The first thing the captain had done with his “office” was to fit it with a duplicate of the ship’s communications terminals. Everything, that paaed in or out of the ship ap-peared on those private monitors. He kept his own log on them, encoded so that no one else could read it. He could even use the system to monitor almost every compartment in the ship itself. He did so, often, especially when his wife was aboard and out of his immediate presence.

Captain Blow-Your-Horn had not mentioned this to any of his crew. He was aware that some of them would object to his prying into their privacy. Of course, he didn’t agree. In his mind, it was simply the kind of advantage that it was proper for a ship’s captain to have—how else could you make sure everybody was obeying orders?

Comfortably strapped in, Darryl Washington first turned his monitor to outgoing transmissions, just to make sure that Boulat Kotsvili had been, doing his other job as ship’s data-transmitter. He had been, of course. He might now be trying to patch up the sick Murghad Fasbar, but the transmitter was still on automatic, busily pumping data back to the spacer habitats around Sol. Just at that moment it was shots of the carpet whales that were being trans-mitted—probably taken by Fasbar himself, before he had ruined his lungs. Washington didn’t watch for long. No one did any more; it was too boring. To make the long trip back to Sol, the data bits that made up any message had to be transmitted slowly and repetitively, with redundancies and parity checks. It took more than an hour to transmit a minute’s worth of recording, and then what showed up on those twenty-year-distant screens would be only a single frame, drawing itself dot by dot and line by line—and do-ing it three times, because each frame was transmitted thrice, as seen through the red, cyan, and green filters. That was the only way that the pictures could be reconstituted in full color back on the TV screens of Earth, Mars, and the Spacer habitats in orbit.

There was no reason to watch it. Washington knew of something more important to do, and was about to do it when the intercom sounded. It was his wife. “Murqhad’s really sick,” she reported.

“Boulat says, most of his alveoli are crushed and he may have to try transplants. I told him he shouldn’t go out in that soupy air without a suit, but he wanted to try to talk to the carpet whales direct.”

“So it’s all his own fault,” Washington said briefly, dismissing Murqhad Fasbar and studying his wife.

She looked both tired and muscular. They all took steroids, of course, before venturing onto Genji; but the effort of deal-ing with Genji’s high gravity had put muscles on her mus-cles. He said importantly,

“I’ve got other things on my mind right now.”

“The Japanese?”

Washington nodded peevishly. They didn’t finish their ship for three years after we launched. How did they get here so fast?”

Nicole’s face on the screen looked patient—it was a way she often looked at her husband. “Boulat says they probably just went faster. They come from Earth, you know. They start out with a one-gee environment, so they could just put on more thrust—maybe work up to a gee and a half, so they’d be ready for Genji. Why didn’t we think of that?”

“It would’ve killed us!” he snapped, nettled at the criticism. He believed it was true. The spacers weren’t used to high gravity, even with steroids.

“It might’ve killed you,” she said, pointedly gazing at his flesh. His first (and only) landing on Genji nearly had, with all that blubber to lug around. “We did increase the thrust gradually; otherwise we couldn’t have landed in the first place. We just could’ve done more. Why didn’t you think of that, Darry?”

“I didn’t set the flight plan! Captain Markorian did that!”

“But—” she began, and then, gazing at him, stopped. She changed the subject. “Question is, what do we do now? I’ve been talking to Boulat, and he thinks we ought to do Chujo.”

“Chujo!” he barked, nettled—how dare his crew think about future plans behind his back?

“It makes sense, Darry. We’ve already sent back a load of stuff on Genji, but we never touched Chujo at all.”

He glared at her. “Because Chujo’s a waste of time! Genji has sapients. They’re what people are interested in, not plants and maybe some creepy-crawlies like on Chujo.”

“But we ought to at least look—”

–We have looked,” Washington informed his wife. “All those scans.” He was on firm ground there, he was sure. They had their own robot satellite, still orbiting Chujo and sending back data, though none of it was very inter-esting. Scenery? Chujo had plenty of scenery, if that was what you were interested in: mountains, brackish seas, dried riverbeds, the “ring of fire” all around its globe where moonside and starside met; well, what about it?

To be sure, there was definitely some evidence of life. The “fuzzy” logic of the ship’s computers had teased a few portraits out of the quick snapshots of the scans. The ones they called “trolls”: tall, two-legged, toothed—and clawed, too, because one of the frames had shown a troll ripping the guts out of one of the long-legged things, like skinny kangaroos, they’d named the “high-jumpers.” Well, how would you like to meet up with a troll in some dark Chujoan alley?

“There used to be something better there,” she re-minded him.

Washington glared at her silently for a moment. It was true enough. The scans had produced pictures to suggest it, and for that matter even the original automated Japanese probe had found signs that there had once been perhaps something almost like a civilization on the paired planet. At least, there might have been things that could once have been buildings.

“We couldn’t do everything at once,” he barked, feel-ing the challenge to his authority. Everybody had agreed that Genji was the priority target! Genji was where the real action was, with its himatids and carpet whales and all kinds of smart, or semismart, fauna.

She sighed. “We’ll talk it over later, hon,” she con-ceded. “First I’m going to take a shower.”

And at last Washington had the chance to do what he had been setting out to do.

He had sealed orders,

Before he opened Markorian’s old file there was some-thing else he wanted to look at. They weren’t really sealed, because they had come over the radio from cis-Mercury, and they weren’t really orders.

But he took them seriously. He slipped his own record capsule into the machine and set the program to his private decode mode. Naturally, no one’s private messages .were private if they were transmitted in the clear.

He played once again the last message he had received from his father.

It was interesting that, on the screen, the old man didn’t look any older, but it wasn’t surprising. The message had taken almost as long to get to Murasaki as the ship had. Though the captain had received it only a few days earlier, it was a voice across the decades, twenty years out of date. When Roy Washington stepped up to the TV cam-eras and sent it, the ship was still less than halfway through the acceleration phase of its journey. Johnny Marlcorian was still alive then—and still captain. Aaron Kammer was still hale and healthy....

And Nicole was just getting ready to divorce him and many Kammer.

The captain bit his lip and glared at the screen, where his father was beaming in pride. “I’m glad things are going so well for you, Darryl. If your mother had lived she’d certainly be thrilled to see you making something out of yourself at last. Nicole’s parents were on the screen last night, and the three of us drank a toast to you two love birds.” Then he frowned. “There’s something funny, though. They heard the same rumors we did about coming back early instead of staying for the full ten years. I think it has something to do with the Japs—they’re launching any day now, I hear. Well, this is expensive, so I’ll just say that we all think of you, and miss you ... and give that pretty bride of yours a kiss from your father.”

Frowning, Washington switched to Markorian’s pri-vate log and scrolled to the entry he wanted:

“My private instructions are that if the Japanese get their ship going ahead of schedule we are to turn around and come back as soon as they get to Murasaki. This is an economic necessity, because the first samples returned will be the most valuable—”

He let it run, but he wasn’t listening any more. He was thinking about the damn Japanese. What should he do?

He knew what the real Captain Hornblower would have done when an enemy ship hove in sight. He would have tacked right up to the other ship, opened the gun ports and dismasted it, and then probably led a party to board the enemy vessel, cutlass in hand. Of course, you didn’t do that kind of thing with spaceships. Even if you had gun ports to open, or guns of any kind. Even if you had the sort of loyal, brave crew that would follow you through the gates of hell, instead of this bunch of cripples and com-plainers...

“Oh, hell,” he said out loud. He wondered what his father would think if he could see him at that moment. Probably that his son was doing the sloppy, inept kind of job both his parents had always expected from him.

It was simply unfair. They’d spent eleven years, one month, and twenty-two days in transit, trying to find some-thing to do. Now they’d spent more than a year trying to do a tenth of one percent of the things they ought to do—all short on sleep, cutting corners every which way....

And now this!

Still frowning, Washington reached to turn off the ma-chine—and clumsily missed the switch. His fingers hit cen-timeters below the keyboard.

That was the first he realized that there was a slow buildup of thrust. The ship was easing out of Low Genji Orbit. It was moving somewhere else.

By the time Washington reached the control room both Kammer and Boulat Kotsvili were there before him, hang-ing on the captain’s net. He knew before he got there who would be usurping his place, and of course he was right. “God damn it, Nicole!” he exploded: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Shut up, Darry,” she said patiently. “I started to set up the course for Chujo for you because that was the ob-vious next step for us to take. Then I saw that we were in a good launch window, and I thought we’d better not miss it.”

That isn’t your job! That’s up to the captain!” he shouted, but they were only looking at him patiently, Kam-mer sleepy-eyed, Kotsvili with a thermosonde dangling around his neck—Nicole, of course, with that offhand tol-erance that drove him crazy. “Well, it isn’t,” he finished.

Nicole didn’t even respond. She only said, “Every-body knows we’ve got to land on Chujo.”

“Chujo’s worthless,” her husband said obstinately.

“Chujo’s a whole planet,” she reminded him. “There are buildings there.”

“There are rocks there. They don’t look like buildings to me. Worthless!”

She was losing her patience. “And how do we know it’s worthless until we send somebody down to look at it? Back home they expect us to get there before anyone else, don’t they? That’s what being first means, so we’ve got to go there. The only thing we have to decide is who does the landing.”

“Me, for one,” Aaron Kammer said at once.

Everybody looked at him in surprise. Then they looked back at each other as though he hadn’t spoken. “I can’t go,” Kotsvili said reluctantly. “I’ve got to take care of Murqhad.”

The captain said harshly, “Let me see the course.” Silently Nicole displayed it for him on the screen, with all the bums and vector changes. Washington glowered at it. “It’s all right,” he grumbled, “but, really, I don’t think—”

Kotsvili spoke right over him. “It’s a two-day trip to get to low Chujo,” he pointed out. “Then we’ll send the lander down, couple of hours each way; say six or eight hours on the surface to look around—”

“More than that,” Nicole objected. “I want to spend at least one whole Chujo daylight there. Maybe more.”

Her husband looked affronted_ The Chujo day, like the Genjian, lasted forty-seven hours with a forty-seven-hour night following.

“That’s practically a week we’ll be away from Low Genji Orbit!” he complained.

Kotsvili added, “What if the people on Genji need something? And you’ve got the lander tied up?”

What the people on Genji might want was not what had been on the captain’s mind; it was what his wife had said.

“So you think you ought to go,” he said meditatively, searching for a reason to forbid it.

,

“I am going, yes,” she told him.

“But not alone,” Aaron Kammer said firmly.

They all looked at him again. “Oh, Airy,” Nicole said without patience, “what if you get sick down there?”

He didn’t argue the question. He just said, “I’m going. I have a right to that much.”

“A right,” the captain sneered. What did a ship’s crew need with rights? But he could see that Kotsvili was nodding agreement, and then even Nicole, after a moment’s reflection, said:

“Maybe you’re the best choice to go with me at that, Airy, only your health—”

“I just had a transfusion,” Kammer reminded her. “I’ll be okay for a while, no matter what.”

The captain glowered at them indecisively. It offended him that no one had bothered with even the formality of asking him to approve the mission. They would go ahead anyhow, of course, whatever he said. He knew that. But they should at least ask.

He stood up, unbuckling his harness. He reminded himself that he still had some rights of his own.

“You’ve got one daylight and that’s all,” he said, listening with pleasure to the commanding tone of his voice. “Then I take the ship back to Genji orbit.”

“But what if we need more time?” Kammer objected. “You don’t have it. That’s final. Now come to bed, Nicole,” he ordered his wife, triumphantly.

The landing on Chujo was uneventful. That didn’t keep most of the people involved from having high emo-tional reactions. Captain Blow-Your-Horn glowered at the dwindling flare of rocket exhaust as though he wanted to kill. In the lander Aaron Kammer was grinning with pleas-ure as he guided, the ship in He wasn’t the best choice for pilot, of course—hadn’t had anything like the practice his ex-wife had.

But Nicole let him take the controls. Partly because she had some private business to attend to in the lander’s little sanitary room, mostly because she could see how desperately he wanted it... and because she knew how unlikely it was that Kammer’s wants for the future would ever be satisfied.

3

Chujo was cold, because its thin air didn’t trap much heat from Murasalci, whereas Genji had been hot because its murky miasma did. They landed on a mesa, just on the bright side of the dawn terminator.

There were some really impressive mountains off to the east, and their landing site was on the shoulder of another one.

As soon as they were out of the ship they were both giggling. Chujo felt good. On Genji everyone weighed half again as much as Earth-normal; on Chujo only a fraction of that—good news for spacers.

Or even for ex-Martians. On Genji you had to wear a pressure suit at low elevations, unless you wanted to wreck your metabolism and cough your lungs out, like poor, foolish Murqhad Fasbar. And on Chujo, at least at this elevation, all you needed was a nose mask to supplement the tiny partial pressure of oxygen, and then you could roam anywhere you liked. Almost.

“This is fiuz!” Aaron Kammer called to his ex-wife over the noise of the buggy as they rode it up to the for-mation that might, or might not, be ruins of some kind. Laughing, she agreed with him. It was so good to see Airy happy again!

Nicole was pleasPd with her landing, too. It had been a piece of cake, and all the time they were setting up to explore—deploying the plastic shelter, fitting each other’s nose masks, reporting in to sullen Captain Washington up in orbit in the big ship—she was conscious of the way her onetime husband kept looking at her. She liked it. It was pleasurably exciting to be alone with this sweet, sad (and not at all disgustingly fat) man she had once been married to. Being alone together had rarely happened since the di-vorce. She wondered, not in the least apprehensively, if he would make any sort of sexual advances to her. She was pretty sure he might, and anyway she had resources of her own.

But there was business to attend to. Nicole had not forgotten that there was a world to explore, and that it was Airy’s first. Everyone else on the ship had had some ex-perience of that on Genji. Only Kammer had been left out, because Boulat Kotsvili’s tests had warned that his dam-aged body couldn’t take Genji’s extra gravity. Nicole could see her ex-husband’s excitement, and was only mildly dis-appointed to be aware that iit had little to do with her. Mostly it was the thrill of at last doing the thing they had all come so far to do—doing it himself, in the flesh. Before they had gone a kilometer he could sit still no longer. “I can climb faster than this,” he told her, and before she could stop him he was out of the buggy and trotting up the hill.

“Be careful!” she called, meaning, For God’s sake, Airy, don’t kill yourself this first time! But he only waved over his shoulder and kept on trotting.

The valley had broadened out into another broad meadow, twenty or thirty hectares of low yellow bushes. Nicole followed with the camera on Aaron as he ran over to touch them and came back with a handful of purplish berries the size of plums. Nicole wrinkled her nose under the mask. “What’s that smell?”

“I guess it’s the plants. They do smell pretty high,” her admitted, “but I bet these are food for.

something.”

“Something small and harmless, I hope,” she said, but she was smiling as he dropped them in the buggy and turned to rape ahead again.

They were following a nearly dry rivercourse up the mountain, with yellow-green forests on both sides. It wasn’t much of a river, just an icy-cold trickle from the glaciers high on the peak, but it made the closest thing to a roadway for them. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a very straight road. Nicole could only keep track of Kammer for a few minutes before he was out of sight on a bend of the stream.

She did what she was supposed to do, though. She guided the buggy with one hand and operated the camera with the other pictures of the stream, pictures of the rocks it flowed through, pictures mostly of the curious trees—well, treelike things—that grew all around them. They would have to get samples of those trees, too—leaves, wood, fruit, and flowers if they had any. But she didn’t want to stop now, because she didn’t want to leave Kammer too long alone. On the way back would be plenty of time.

Peering ahead, she could make out glimpses of the odd formation they hoped might once have been a “city.” If it was, it certainly didn’t have any inhabitants any more. It had been visible enough to pick out from the orbital weans because it was exposed on a hillside. For the same reason, it was pretty well erased by time now. A thousand dust storms had eaten away most of the structure in Chujo’s high winds; landslides from the slopes above had buried most of the rest of it.

Of course, there might still be some kinds of animals living in the ruins.

So she was relieved when the buggy nosed around a final bend and she could clearly see the oddly straight-lined rock formations they had picked out from space. She killed the motor and got out to join Aaron, lugging the camera. He was out of sight, but with the motor off she could track him by the crack of his geologist’s, hammer as he took samples of some rock or other.

It was all stone—several different kinds of stone. Nicole was not geologist enough to identify them at a glance, but one white stone was, veined like marble, another a dull scarlet, another black as onyx.

,

There wasn’t any doubt about it any more. Long be-fore she reached Kammer she knew what he was going to say, because she had confirmed it for herself—the low walls, the unnaturally rectilinear bits of rubble—and, on the other side of that square-edged gap in the wall that might have been—no, really, surely was—a doorway, there was Aaron, turning around in delight to call to her: “Do you see, Nicky?

These aren’t just rocks. These were buildings! There was a time when people lived here!”

And, laughing, she called back, “Don’t get so excited, Airy. But, yes, I think so, too.”

In the three years they were married Nicole had re-ally loved Aaron Kammer. She remembered positively that that was true—well, up to a point. anyway. There were different kinds of love, surely.

There was the kind you dreamed of when you were fifteen and the teenage boys you knew, with their bruising kisses and clumsy hands, were simply an obstacle course you had to get through on the way to the Real Thing. The Real Thing was moonlit nights, warm breezes, you in a filmy dress with flowers in your hair and him tall and wise and tender. That was all fantasy, of course, especially for a spacer girl like Nicole2—you didn’t get moonlit nights in a habitat. But it was such a sweet and painful fantasy. Then there was the kind of love you hoped for when you were twenty, with a man who would put a child in your belly and share your work and your life, as well as your bed. How disappointing that that had turned out to be only fantasy, too, when you confronted the reality of the noisy, smelly, crowded little spaceship in midflight, with years behind you and years still to go.

It was a fact that when Nicole decided to switch hus-bands there was a lingering thought, in some part of her head, that Aaron’s were the kind of genes she would like her kids to have.

But that was just another fantasy. Like every other woman on the ship, she had continued to wear her fertility blocker, because what were they going to do with a bunch of babies on a ship that was already too small for its grown-up crew? Reluctantly, Nicole had concluded that there wasn’t any version of romantic love that could survive on a long-distance spaceship.

The thing about the present situation was that they weren’t on the spaceship any more.

There was another significant fact, though, and that was that they weren’t married any more, either.

That fact troubled Nicole—some. The man she had divorced to marry Aaron Kammer was her husband

,

again. The trou-bling part of that was that Nicole had a persistent conviction that married people should not love anybody but each other.

To divorce a man was supposed to mean that you stopped loving him. •

Yet here, on this cold, strange planet, it didn’t seem to be working out that way.

Aaron was different here, for one thing. He was alive again. She had never seen him so happy and so excited. Certainly he still coughed and his hands still trembled, be-cause he was still well into that process of dying. She knew that he was pushing his strength farther than it ought to go. But she couldn’t stop him, because he was so completely absorbed in this exploration, chipping off bits of rock and throwing them on the buggy, scraping soil off what might have been flooring, shouting with joy as he picked up a thing like a potsherd or uncovered a thing like a rusted blade. So all that time she followed him around with the camera, watching him, and her heart was melting inside her.

It was Nicole who insisted that they stop and rest a mo-ment. “And we have to eat something, too,”

she ordered.

Kammer looked at her in surprise. Then he reached out and touched her face—well, touched her mask, anyway; but it was a tender, tolerant kind of touch. “You know what you are, Nicky? You’re blasé. This isn’t exciting to you any more, is it?”

She said, grinning under the nose mask, “It’s no big thrill. You’ve put your hands on me plenty of times before this.”

He pulled his fingers back as though she had burned him. “No, I mean exploring. Coming to this place,” he explained. “You’ve done it all already, haven’t you? I mean, on Genji? But for me—”

He shook his head, delighted. Nicole said practically, “We still have to eat, you know.”

“Oh, sure,” he agreed, but his eyes were roving. He even tried to do, what she ordered, but it was impossible. He couldn’t make himself sit still. Long before she had finished chewing the last of the rations they had brought he was up again, circling the ruins, peering curiously into the stunted woods around them.

Nicole was not immune to the excitement of exploring Chujo, with its purply sky and the great crescent of Genji hanging off to one side. She was interested in what she saw, camera always busy, talking notes into her recorder about the sparseness of the birds (nothing like the flocks in Genji’s soupy air; flying was hard work on Chujo) and the absolute absence of any detectable animal life (but of course they would have hidden from strangers, with all the noise they were making). But she could have called it a day a lot sooner if she had not been so pleased to indulge Kammer’s delight. So she let her compassion outweigh her better judgment. They stayed a good deal longer than she had planned, but at last she called a halt. “Back to the !ander,– she ordered. “We have to report in next time the ship’s overhead. Besides, you’ve got to rest.–

“Just a little more—?”

“Now,” she commanded.

He pouted at her, then grinned. “You drive,” he said.

And while she was easing the buggy over the bumps and depressions on the way back down the hill, Kammer was loping around the margin of the forest, running back to the buggy with samples of leaves and fruits, never still, though she saw that his face was paling with fatigue.

In that reeking broad valley he dumped a load of the berry plants and she caught his hand. “Enough, Airy! We’ll come back here if you like—but I want you alive when we do it.”

He pulled free, trotting alongside the buggy, panting a little. –Well,” he said, “I suppose you’re right.

Look, I’ve got something for you.”

Carefully he pulled a little purple-blue flower out of his pouch and handed it to her. She looked at it and sniffed. It certainly didn’t smell like any flower she’d-ever seen from Earth; if it had any scent at all, it was more like ancient mold than rosebuds. “It’s pretty,” she said, guiding the buggy with one hand while she turned it in her fingers.

“It’s the prettiest one I’ve seen,” he told her: “I’m the discoverer, so I’m naming it after you.

Kammeria ni-colensia, or something like that.”

She stared at him, suddenly embarrassed. He grinned and said, “Hang on to it, Nicky. Now just let me go back and get a couple of other things from the woods there. I saw some shrubs—”

“Airy!” she called peremptorily. But he was already on his way, halfway to the forest edge.

,

Nicole cursed to herself, and then out loud as the buggy hit a tuft of tangled vegetation and jolted alarmingly. By the time she got it straightened out and looked back, she was startled to see that Kammer was sprawled on the ground in the middle of the field.

“Airy!” she shouted again, panic this time. She stopped the buggy and ran over to him. He was trying to stand up, hand pressed to his forehead. There was blood on his fingers. “What happened?” she demanded, helping him up.

He stared at her dnn’dly. “I—I don’t know. Some-thing hit me on the head.”

“What could hit you on the head?” she snapped—foolishly. Angrily. And then she heard something whiz through the thin air by them only centimeters away. “Oh, shit,” she snarled. “Let’s get out of here!

Somebody’s throwing rocks at us!”

Once they were in the lander Nicole felt safer—a little bit, anyway. With the port closed and the cut on Kammer’s head bandaged, she began to breathe more easily. It was a deep cut, and it bled a lot, but the bone wasn’t broken.

Then Aaron insisted on opening the port again so he could check the hold-downs on the external shelter, for fear of one of Chujo’s sudden windstorms—he explained that he knew better than Nicole what they might be like, being Martian. Then at last he was willing to lie down and rest while ‘she reported in to the ship. Yes, she informed the captain, there was definitely life on Chujo—animal life.

“Those trolls in the picture?” the captain asked.

Nicole shuddered, remembering the noseless, apelike face and the teeth. “I don’t know. I couldn’t see them,” she said, “but Airy claims he did.”

“Well, almost,” he called from the berth beside, her. “I just saw shadows, really.”

“Intelligent?” Nicole said, returning to Captain Wash-ington’s questions. “How do I know if they’re intelligent? They throw rocks, but so do apes. No, I think we’re safe enough here. I’ve got the sensors up, and there’s nothing moving within half a kilometer.”

“The trolls won’t come out of the forest,” Aaron put in.

She turned and frowned at him. “You don’t know that.”

“They didn’t follow me,” he pointed out.

She shook her head, but the captain was still speaking. “Well,’” he said, “if you say there are buildings there I’ll take your word for it.”

“Ruins, really,” Nicole corrected.

“Of course they’re just ruins. We know that much, don’t we? And the scans from your landing orbit—?”

Of course, they had left the external cameras on as they looped in’ for their landing. “Have you analyzed the data? Any good pictures?”

“13orilig,” her husband told her. “Well, there are def-initely buildings. More on starside than here, but all abandoned,”

“Well, then!” Nicole said. “We ought to have at least one more landing on starside, right?”

“Wrong. We’re going. I’ve already notified all the parties on Genji to stand by for pickup.”

“But at least look at the starside buildings—”

“No.” Nicole sighed. When Darryl Washington had made up his mind there was no changing him, right or wrong. Especially when he was wrong.

“Then at least let us see if we can find some animal life to bag.”

“Only if you can do it before local dark,” he said firmly. “Why bother? Animals are animals. If there ever was anyone civilized enough to build things on Chujo, they’re all dead now.”

“Except for the rock throwers,” Nicole said.

The radio was silent for a moment. “If you’re in any danger—” the captain began.

“We aren’t!” Kammer called emphatically.

“—just as a precaution, you have enough fuel to jump and land again somewhere else a few hundred kilometers away.”

“Negative!” Kammer said. “I want to see what’s here.”

More silence from the radio. Then, “I wish you’d taken some weapons,” the captain fretted.

“But we didn’t,” said Nicole. “Now I’m going to switch over to data transmission so you can see our pictures before you get below the horizon again. Talk to you later, after we get some—something to eat,”

she finished, chang-ing her mind. She had been about to say, “get some sleep.” But to say that, to her very jealous husband, had suddenly seemed tactless.

They hadn’t taken a food machine for just the two of them, so all there was in the larder was dehydrates and radiation-stabilized-fruits. Well, almost all. Nicole had at the last moment packed some precious, hoarded wine as a little surprise.

Aaron had been drowsing off and on while she was on the radio, and now he was sound asleep. She watched him carefully. He looked so tired. She tried to remember what he had looked like when she had come to the conclu-sion she was more in love with Aaron Kammer than the man she was married to.

He’d been good-looking then, be-fore he let himself get burned refitting the drive. Even now, she thought, Aaron had a good, strong, solid body, without all that disgusting blubber Darryl Washington had allowed himself to grow. Not to mention a lot better disposition. Not to mention his Well, his sweetness. Aaron Kammer had enough of that for export. Who else would make clothes for a cat?

Sweetness hadn’t been enough. And anyway, she thought, you can get really tired of sweetness.

When she woke him to say that dinner was ready, he blinked up at her contentedly. “How’s your head?” she asked.

“Fine,” he said, dismissing the subject. Lying about it, of course. “What’s this?” he asked, looking curiously at the pouch of wine, but amused because he knew the answer. “I didn’t know you had any wine left.”

“This is the last. I thought we might celebrate,” she said.

“Celebrate what?”

“Celebrate this, dummy! You know, this is the first time we’ve ever been really alone together?”

He gave her a thoughtful look as he sipped from the cup, but all he said was, “I guess I was sleeping while you were talking to the ship. How’s Blow-Your-Horn?”

She looked at him. “He’s fine,” she said shortly. “You shouldn’t call him that.”

“And you shouldn’t have—” He cut himself off, not wanting to say what was coming next.

“Go on,” she prodded. “What shouldn’t I have?”

“I don’t have any right to tell you what you should do,” he said.

“Oh, damn you, Airy, quit being so goddamned un-derstanding. What’s on your stupid mind?”

He grinned at her, feeling better. “I just can’t help wondering why you went back to him, after.”

“After you got hurt and I dumped you, you mean.”

“No, Nicole,” he said earnestly, “that’s not what 1 mean. At least, not that way. I know why you didn’t want to be married to me any more. I was sick. You thought I was going to die, and I was—still am. I was a real drag; I know that. But why him?”

. Nicole hesitated, wondering how much truth to tell him. She tried a little, experimentally. “Darryl wasn’t so bad in the old days. Before he got fat. Before he was cap-tain. And anyway—” She shrugged and took the plunge. “Anyway, 1 owed him.”

Kammer was startled at last. “You owed Darryl?”

She toyed with her food. “It goes back a long way,” she said slowly. “When I was nineteen years old, I got raped. See, Airy, it never happened to you, so you don’t know what that’s like. After it’s over you feel like-Christ—I can’t tell you what you feel like. You feel like a toilet that’s just been pissed in, and you keep on feeling that way.”

He looked startled and puzzled at once. “You don’t mean Darryl was the one who raped you?”

“Oh, hell, no. Just a guy. A date.”

“Well, did the police—”

She stopped him. “I didn’t report it. Maybe I should have, I think now I should, but I didn’t.

Anyway, then Darryl was there, and he was so strong, and he seemed to know what he was going to do with his life, and he liked me and wanted me to volunteer along with him for this—and most of all,” she said, grimacing, “he could protect me, Airy. Or I thought he could. And anyway we’d be a million kilometers away from everybody if we signed up.” She stopped and grinned sadly at him. “I guess that was why I ditched you, Airy. When you were sick you couldn’t protect me any more.”

“But going back to Darryl... “

“A woman doesn’t have that many choices out here, does she? And he was the captain. And, damn it, Airy,” she flared, “why did you start that Blow-Your-Horn stuff? It makes it really hard on him, and I trusted you, Airy!”

He shrugged. “I guess a woman should never repeat one husband’s pillow talk to the next guy. Well, that doesn’t excuse me, does it? I’m sony. I was—well, not happy, after you dumped me.”

“It was my fault,” she said, reflecting that she didn’t seem to understand just how a man felt when he got dumped. “I’m sorry, too. We should’ve worked things out better. If it was up to me we’d forget about all this pairing-off business and just make love when we felt like it with whom we felt like doing it with,” she declared, watching him.

He grinned. “A lot of you came close enough to that, the last year or so before we reached Murasaki.”

She smiled back. “Darryl raised hell about the fist-fights that came out of it,” she said reminiscently.

“Me—”

“You what?” he challenged.

“Me, I thought those days were exciting,” she said.

It was strange to be preparing for sleep in broad day-light—hardly even noon, by Chujo’s long day.

“Did I miss anything from the ship?” Kammer asked.

“Well,” she said, hesitantly, “there is one thing. It’s kind of like repeating pillow talk again, but I guess you ought to know. Darryl’s evacuating Genji. He wants to head for home before the Jap ship gets here.”

“I’m not surprised,” Aaron said, and yawned. “I guess it’s the wine,” he apologized, grinning. “And maybe just being here, you know? It’s such a nice break. Don’t you get tired of being in a ship?”

“I haven’t been stuck in one as long as you have,” she told him. “Don’t forget I did a tour on Genji.”

He nodded, then looked across the bedding at her. “And what’s the captain going to think about the two of us sleeping so close together?”

She shrugged, tugging the sleeping sacks nearer. “What do you think about it?” she asked.

Kammer didn’t answer, just watched her closely. She was very conscious of that. It was disconcerting, in an un-expected way. She said over her shoulder, “When that troll hit you I thought you were dead.”

“Sorry,” he said, grinning again.

“Don’t be a fool,” she said. Then, “Airy? I never thanked you for Bandit’s hat. It was nice of you to make it for her.”

“It wasn’t really finished. Did you try it on?”

“She loved it. Come here,” she said, and gave him a kiss. “You’re a nice man,” she told him, pulling back breathlessly, looking at him with humor and fondness. She was not at all surprised when they kissed again, and kept on kissing.

When she woke up the ship was still and she was curled up with a sleeping sack over her. Nicole stretched comfortably before opening her eyes.

She wasn’t surprised to be alone. No doubt Kammer had retired to his own place after they’d made love and she had fallen asleep. She thought drowsily about her absent husband for a moment, wondering whether she would tell him about this, or not, and what he would say if she did. It didn’t seem important.

It was all too far in the future to worry about.

“Airy,” she called, “it’s your turn to make break-fast.” And listened for a response.

But there wasn’t any. He wasn’t there.

He wasn’t in the ship at all. The exit port was un-locked. It had been pushed shut from the outside, and Aaron Kammer was gone.

4

By Richard Feynman’s criteria, Kammer decided, his state was no longer stable. All sorts of fast things were happening, and that special slow change of his own body from “life” to “death” wasn’t really slow any more. It was definitely picking up speed.

For some reason, that knowledge didn’t frighten him. He wasn’t even in real pain. His head still hurt, but that didn’t matter. And as to his mood he had, after all, had plenty of time to get used to the death sentence.

Although it was never hot on Chujo, Kammer felt him-self sweating as he drove the buggy down and away from the lander. The buggy wasn’t designed for such work as pushing through groves of trees as densely matted as these. The things were like cypress in a swamp, clustering around the place where the river once had been, perhaps sucking up water from what was underground. The twisting and bumping of the buggy made his head throb, but he was happy. The only thing he really regretted was not answering Nicole’s voice when she called after him on the radio—demanding, pleading, hurting his conscience. She was still doing it, off and on. The sound was tiny, almost drowned out by the whine of the buggy’s motor and the crackling of the slenderer tree trunks as he forced his way through them, because he had turned it down. But he knew what she was saying.

He was two or three hundred vertical meters below the plain where they had landed the shuttle.now, and the river-bed was opening ‘up into a grander plain than anything above. Kammer paused, making sure the camera was going. He had turned the transmitter off, but everything was being stored. The pictures would not be wasted, he told himself, but he didn’t want Nicole tracking his transmissions. Not just now, ...

He did not face the question of whether he wanted that ever.

Experimentally, Kammer took the nose mask off for a moment, inhaling the thin Chujoan air. He could, he de-cided, get by. without the mask—for a while, at any rate; especially now that he was going down the hill rather than up. It helped that he was Martian born, used to the standard 800-millibar air of the Martian domes. It made him feel almost at home.. He looked around, feeling excited and pleased.

What he saw looked very like a valley in, say, one of the western American states on Earth. It looked planted. There were three big plots, separated by clumps of woods. The plots bore scars that might once have been streams winding through them, two of a single yellow-orangey kind of spiky vegetation, the other of a different kind, more like vines. The wind brought him the same faintly repellent smell that he had noticed in the field with the berries. It was not a smell he had found in, say, the forest.

The fields seemed to have a lot in common, not least that each one of them was composed entirely of a single species of plant.

Monoculture wasn’t natural. Monoculture was some thing people did. And it was an interesting fact that, on this gently sloping mountainside, these fields were all quite level.

Kammer thought about that for a moment, listening to the silence; with only the faint purr of the camera motor and the distant noise of wind in the woods. There was only one word that fit the situation.

Farms. These plots looked very much like farms.

Then, buoyed and excited, he started the buggy again and crossed one of the plantings, the stink strong around him as the vegetation was crushed under the buggy wheels. He did not stop until he was at the verge of the next wooded area.. ..

And might not have stopped then if he hadn’t heard the screaming.

Aaron Kammer didn’t merely stop the buggy. He stopped the motor, stopped moving, almost stopped breath-ing. The screams were both loud and terrible. Some living thing was being hurt very badly and with murderous vio-lence; there was a thrashing in the forest as saplings were being knocked about in a ferocious struggle.

Kammer stood up in his driver’s seat, craning his neck to peer through the yellow-brown tendrils. It sounded like a catfight—but had to be huge cats!—and there was a flurry of fast-moving large shapes—and it was moving.

It was coming in his direction.

There were four animals involved. One was a quad-ruped the size of a bear; it was skull-faced, and it was bleeding and bleating as it tried to escape from its attackers.

Who were trolls.

They were clear to see this time, and there was no doubt of their identity. Kanuner recognized them at once from the handful of frames in the reconnaissance scans. They were half again as tall as a man—even a Spacer. Two-legged, like a man, with the same noseless face as the an-imal they were killing. They had the built-in weaponry any predator had to possess for murder: long blue talons, a shark’s mouthful of teeth.

Kammer bent hastily to detach the camera from its mount so he could capture this scene for the archives. As quickly as he could he stood up again, eye to the finder, aiming at the death scene. When he had the animal in sight he zoomed the lens to bring it into sharp focus, right up front. It was a sickening spectacle. Kammer was revolted to see the details of its awfully lacerated hide, covered with a feathery sort of coating, not hair, not real feathers, per-haps rudimentary scales.

It took him a moment to realize that he was not getting the attackers in the shot, and then another to discover that the sounds of screaming had stopped.

The trolls were not slashing at their prey any more.

Belatedly Kammer took his eye away from the finder. When he saw the trolls, all three of them were loping si-lently through the trees—toward him.

If Kammer was resigned to his approaching death, he still could not help the shock of terror that drove him back into his seat. Frantically he was starting the buggy, wheel-ing it at top speed in a great arc, back out of the woods and across the planted field. A rock whizzed past his head and struck the windscreen; the screen did not shatter, but his vision through it was distorted by the cra7Prl star design the missile had left. He ducked down, foot pressed with all his strength to the accelerator pedal. He did not think the buggy could travel as fast as the trolls. He expected at any moment to have one of them scrabble up over the back of the buggy on top of him, .clawing and biting. He risked lifting, his head and turning around

He had an unexpected reprieve.

All three of the trolls had stopped at the edge of the planted field. They were throwing rocks, but they weren’t following; and he was nearly across the field, farther than even their pitching arms could reach

Almost into the woods on the other side, in fact; but Kammer did not realize that until the buggy struck head-on against a giant of the forest, catapulting him into the windscreen.

If Kammer had been sitting in the normal driver’s po-sition behind the tiller he would have struck the screen headfirst. Certainly he would have knocked himself out at least, even if he hadn’t fractured his skull. He wasn’t; he didn’t; he struck sidewise, with his arm and shoulder taking the brunt of the impact, his legs caught and twisted under him. That was a pity. Unconsciousness would have been preferable to the shock of agony that went through his body. He couldn’t move. He lay there, hurting—hurting worse than ever before in his life—and didn’t realize for some time that he was screaming. When he did notice it it made no difference. He couldn’t stop until sheer exhaustion reduced the volume of sound to an agonized moaning as he lay there with his eyes closed.

When he opened them, a face was looking down at him.

A troll? But it wasn’t leaping at him. And, if a troll, it was a small one—not much taller than Kammer himself; definitely much shorter and more delicately built than the ones that had brought down the bearlike thing. It had the same noseless face (but without that terrifying array of teeth), and he was quite sure that, it couldn’t possibly be one of the trolls, since it didn’t rip his belly open with its long, blue nails.

No, whatever it was, it was definitely not a troll.

Kammer almost forgot to moan as he stared up at the thing; and then it did something incredible. It touched him gently. It whistled softly a few times; clear notes and trilled, like birdsong. It seemed to be expecting him to reply. When he didn’t it gave one last faint, disappointed trill. And then it clambered up on top of the buggy and stood bent over, legs spread, holding to the top of the windscreen, looking down on him while a—a something, a penis perhaps, an organ of some kind at least—extruded itself from flaps of flesh at its groin.

The thing urinated on him. It did so methodically. Lavishly. Copiously. Covering every part of his body with the stream—strong-smelling, foul, almost like the stench of the plantings he had driven through—while regarding him gravely all the while.

Kammer, dazed, managed to whisper through bruised lips, “Why are you doing that to me?”

Of course, the thing didn’t answer. It whistled softly again for a moment. Then it reached down and touched him again, and clambered down off the buggy and was gone, leaving Kammer with the agony of his broken body.

If he was going to die, Kammer thought, he had never, ever, thought it would be like this. He gazed up into the tree overhead, with bright Murasaki shining through the purple-dark sky, near the dimmer, almost hidden disk of Genji. He craned his neck, trying to see over the door of the buggy. No, the thing that had used him for a latrine was gone, or at least not in sight He lay there dazed, while the pain of his fractures and crushed flesh—no, did not dwindle; no, did not become more bearable; simply became more familiar. He knew that he was close to fainting from loss of blood as much as the pain.

Then a flicker of motion caught his attention.

He dragged his head around to see what it was. It was not good news. One of the trolls was standing there, re-garding him with fury. There was no doubt that it was one of the three he had seen in the forest on the other side of the field. Its noseless face was still stained with the chocolaty-red blood of the animal it had attacked.

It did not, however, attack Aaron Kammer.

It simply stood there, watching. And when it was joined by another of its kind, and minutes later by the third, all three simply stood there, chittering softly to each other and watching.

How nice of you trolls, Kammer thought with grati-tude, to wait until I pass out before you kill me.

And then the ruddy canopy of leaves overhead seemed to stir, and shrink, and fall in on him, and indeed he did pass out.

To Aaron Kammer’s surprise, he woke up.

That was something he had not expected at all; it was an unexpected gift from fate, and he allowed himself to relish it for a moment before he addressed the other new surprises. Astonishingly, they were all good. He catalogued them one by one: He didn’t hurt much; he was warm; and, most of all, he definitely was alive.

That was such an unexpected gift that it took a while for him to notice the other surprise. Quite a lot of time must have passed, for it was night. He was lying on his back on the ground, among trees. Through them he could see the purply-dark Chujo sky, with immense Genji hang-ing in it, brighter than a thousand moons.

Night meant that he had been unconscious for quite a long time—at least the equivalent of a day or two Terran, for it had been hardly noon by Chujo’s long standards when he left the sleeping Nicole for his venture.

It also meant something else. They had planned to reorbit in daylight. It was very unlikely that Nicole was still where he had left her.

That was a sobering thought, but, he was sure, a true one. She might have wanted to search for him, but how could she when he had taken the buggy? The lander wasn’t a helicopter, to search the woods from the air—if it had been, how would she have known where to search? And all the way, surely, Captain Blow-Your-Horn would have been ordering her to give it up and come back, insisting, probably even threatening—No. She was gone. It was very unlikely that any other human being was anywhere at all on the surface of this planet.

For what it was worth, Aaron Kammer had an entire world to himself.

He tried to sit up, and could not.

That was another surprise. Not a pleasant one. He lifted his head to look down at his supine body and saw that he was covered with something like a huge leaf—like an electric blanket, too, because he could feel with the heat on his face that it was radiating gentle warmth. But it wasn’t electric. As he pressed against it with his chin it squeaked a faint protest and shuddered before relaxing to cover him again, like a disturbed kitten sleeping at the foot of its master’s bed. The thing was alive.

He could not pause to wonder at that, though, be-cause he was preoccupied with the bad news. He could not move his body at all. Not any part of it below the neck; not arms or fingers or legs or torso.

The good part of that was that none of them was drowning him in pain, as they had been before. They felt nothing at all. His head still hurt—to be sure; a bearable pain, after all the worse ones from his crash.

And his senses had not de-serted him. Even his sense of smell was still working. He recognized the stench of the urine the creature had drenched him with More than that, there was another stink, more familiar, a lot less pleasant. Was it, perhaps, the rot of his own damaged body? He could not answer that; yet he was still alive. His eyes could look around; his ears could hear.

There wasn’t much to hear. The sighing of the thin wind in the trees; some minor, unalarming sounds of ani-mals, perhaps, that might have been stirring, sighing, snuf-fling in their sleep. He couldn’t see them, He did see some little creatures hopping about in the trees—almost like squirrels, he thought, though their tails seemed to be flat and tapering to a point, like a dagger, rather than long and furred. It was—interesting to see them, silhouetted against the disk of Genji, as they silently frol-icked from limb to limb. Kammer watched them with pleas-ure until they moved out of sight.

Then there was nothing much to look at for a while. Kammer could see that he was deep in the forest, and won-dered how he had got there. He wondered, too, what had happened to his body, and why he was not racked with the pain of his broken limbs. He wondered what the blanketlike thing was that was keeping him warm, and who had put it there. He wondered what was going to happen to him next ... but he did not enjoy wondering about that, and dis-missed it from his mind.

He even wondered, for quite a while, why he was calm enough to lie there wondering, when he should have been in a panic, or in pain—or, more likely, dead.

There wasn’t any point in raising questions like that, though. Whatever had been done to him had at least left him conscious and not in pain. It was pleasant enough sim-ply to be lying there, with no problems to face because there was nothing he could do about them.

He wondered, too, why he felt at home. It was a fact, though a puzzling one, that everything about him looked both strange and familiar at the same time.

Then he realized why.

What he was looking at was his own home, or at least his home the way he wished his own home was, Chujo was really another Mars—a Mars blessed with air (though not much) and water (even less), but a Mars with trees and living things moving about freely on its surface. In short, the Mars he had dreamed of as a child.

He laughed out loud at that—and quickly gasped with pain; because the motion had somehow twisted his neck, and something very painful made itself known at the back of the neck, just under his skull.

Then he became aware of a stronger smell, pungent as the urine that had drenched him. He heard a sound of movement. And a great skull-like face was looking down on him.

It was one of the creatures.

With the leisure he had now (nothing but leisure left to him!), Kammer could see that this creature was not a troll. It was not like a troll at all, not even a gracile version of them. It was no more like a troll than Kammer himself was like a mountain gorilla.

“Hello, there,” he said, gasping a little. That was when he realized he had lost his nose mask somewhere along the way; but it seemed he could get by as long as he didn’t overexert himself.

And, in his present condition, there seemed no chance of that.

The creature listened attentively. Then it whistled softly, as though trying to reassure him. It leaned to-ward him, reaching toward the back of his neck with its ill-shaped hands—did they have the right number of fingers?

“Watch it,” Kammer gasped in alarm. “What are you trying to do to me?”

The creature chirruped gently, and stroked his head. The long claws did not touch his skin; it was only the pads that he felt, and they were more soothing than not. But the thing was persistent. It lifted his head carefully, and he could feel it doing something to his spine. Kammer could feel very little, though.

The sensation was very strange; it felt as though thorns or needles had been stuck into him. They didn’t hurt. It was almost like a hypodermic going into nerve-blocked flesh. It took a while for the creature to get the—the whatever they were—adjusted to its satisfac-tion, and Kammer could feel them moving as they were coaxed this way and that

It was all strangely relaxing; and then, without warn-ing, he was asleep again.

The stable system that was Aaron Kammer’s life was at last moving toward the last of those slow changes that ended it.

Of that he was more certain each time he woke. He never stayed awake very long, because sooner or later something would begin to hurt. Then one of the things would come chirruping toward him and readjust whatever it was that they had done to his spinal cord. He was grateful for that. Less grateful, once, when one of them lifted the living rug off his body to inspect it and low in his field of vision Kammer caught a glimpse of his own body. His legs were bent in the wrong way. His naked belly was oozing slow trickles of pussy blood. He stank.

“Sorry about that,” he said, apologetically joking as he stared up into the noseless face. It wasn’t much of a joke. The Chujoan didn’t laugh, of course, but it did some-thing better than that. It offered him cool, clean water out of something like a wineskin—but it seemed to be made of a kind of fabric. with embroidery on its side—and when Kammer had swallowed a little it reached behind him and put him back to sleep.

In the little bit of life Aaron Kammer had left it seemed he had more time than he had ever had before. That was very strange, and he enjoyed pondering over the paradox. The thing was, he only had time. There was nothing he could do. Look around, as best he could, in those short periods when he was conscious. Maybe accept a few sips of water (but even that began to be tiring; just swallowing had become hard work). Watch what he could see

Some of the things he saw were quite interesting. It was worth noting, for instance, that for reasons of their own it seemed the Chujoans had systematically disman-tled his buggy. Parts of it lay spread under the trees, and he spent a pleasurable few waking minutes once watching a tall one and a little one (a child?) soberly rolling one of the great wheels back and forth to each other, while large four-legged animals grazed on the lower tree branches nearby. The Chujoans were playing a kind of game, Kammer realized. It pleased him to find out that his res-cuers had pet animals (or work animals?) and played games, though he was saddened for a moment to see that his camera and transmitter had also been dissected. That was a pity. But, looking on the bright side (which was the only side Kammer had left to look on), it meant that even if. Nicole had managed to persuade the captain to try to mount a rescue party there would be nothing to lead them to his position. And that was good, because he was quite sure there was not going, to be any benefit for him in being found.

He saw, too, the way the Chujoans cooked a meal. One cut fruits and roots into a pot, while another stood whistling softly into the trees. One of the creatures he had seen in the branches hopped into the Chujoan’s outstretched hand; the Chujoan stroked it gently, then wrung its neck and tossed it to the cook. What a very efficient system, Kammer thought, approvingly.

It was a pity that he couldn’t eat any of the stew that resulted, but he simply did not have the strength.

Apart from the fact that it might well have killed him at once ... but of course, things like that didn’t matter any more.

What might have mattered—at least, for a moment Kammer thought it might—was the sudden apparition of those three great trolls in the shadows of the forest. It was night again (how many times had it been night? Kammer couldn’t tell), and his hosts seemed to be asleep. Kammer was nearly certain that the trolls were stealthily approaching one of the four-legged animals, asleep as it leaned against a tree. He tried his best to yell. It wasn’t a very good at-tempt. It wasn’t much more than a harsh gasp, but one of the Chujoans looked up from sleep and saw them; whistled commandingly at them. The trolls retreated grudgingly; the Chujoan strolled over to the draft animals, leaped on the back of the nearest of them, and urinated on each, in turn. (Kammer was interested to see that this Chujoan was per-haps female.) Then she came over to him, and gently put him to sleep again, and that was the end of another period for Aaron Kammer. It was, he thought interestedly when he was awake again, in some ways quite a lot like the inter-stellar trip. These short intervals of consciousness were a species of time dilation; Murasaki rising and setting in its long day-and night, but himself experiencing only a few minutes of wakefulness at a time. That was worth men-tioning to someone, he thought, if only he had someone to mention it to.

He thought, without regret, of all the someones he had left behind on the ship. Most of them had mattered to him lately only as unavoidable pains in the ass, but it hadn’t always been that way. When the ship started out the crew had seemed like well-balanced, easygoing people. A decade and change of living in each other’s pockets had soured all that, but still

It was easy to forgive them everything, Kammer thought, now that he was sure he would never see any of them again.

He did miss Nicole—a little. At least, he thought of her with fondness, though not much regret. But that didn’t matter. He knew that he was growing weaker and that, finally, the last thing he had left to do was to die.

His last thought was that this was a good and friendly place to do it; and perhaps a gentle death was the greatest of the treasures Chujo had to offer.

5

When, the ship was five months along on its long voyage home, Captain Blow-Your-Horn made love to his, wife. It was an occasion for him. It had not happened very often, because she blamed him for Kam-mer’s loss. There had been a week of raging at him as they collected the crews from Genji, made all the worse because she was hopelessly outvoted. Unanimously, the rest of the crew supported his decision to go home, agreed there was no point in trying to find Aaron Kammer (or his body), accepted

,

(or pretended to accept) the captain’s assertion that Kammer was certainly dead, in that unwelcoming place, among all those savage’trolls; and of course Nicole put all the guilt for that on her husband. Then there had been a month and more of cold and silent anger, when she would not sleep in the same harnessed bid with him. Ul-timately, she did return to his bed. Sometimes now they did make love, more frequently they did not, but always, however much she shuddered and gasped, she seldom spoke to him.

Captain Washington did his best with his tempera-mental wife. He spoke of the lost man seldom; and only very kindly. In bed he deferred his own pleasure to her satisfaction, even when it became boring work; but there were certain things on his mind.

Then, five months after departure, on one morning, having waked her from sleep with caresses and certain that he had given her as many orgasms as ever in their life together, he pushed himself kneeling over her, swaying a little with the resilience of the harness. He looked down at her naked body, and could no longer ignore the contour of his wife’s belly.

“You are pregnant, aren’t you?” he asked.

She laced her fingers over her navel and thought for a moment before saying, “Yes, of course I am.”

“Well, why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, speaking softly in order to keep the anger out of his voice.

“Having a baby on the ship—it’s going to be a damned nuisance,” he pointed out. She just closed her eyes without answer-ing. “What if the other women decide to get pregnant, too?”

She didn’t answer that, either, but began to unhook the bedstraps to lift herself out of it. The captain watched her, thinking sentences he didn’t want to say to her. There were a lot of things on his mind. He had plenty of ques-tions, all of which reflected on her irresponsible behavior. What if the baby turns out wrong because of some virus or something from Genji? What if Boulat Kotsvili turns out to be no good as an obstetrician? What if

She was pulling on her boiler suit without looking at him, turned away as though to hide the embryo in her belly from him. But he knew it was there.

He tried to look at the more attractive aspects of the situation. He knew there were some. In a way, the captain told himself, it could be kind of interesting to arrive at a Spacer dock, bowing to the hurrahs of the welcoming crowd, leading a—what would it be?—a strong young son, or even daughter, of nine or ten. He decided to forgive, so he grinned at her. “I guess,” he said, patting her belly, “that women are women, after all, aren’t you? And it’s kind of flattering, I guess.”

“Flattering?” she said, her back still to him, her tone perplexed.

“I mean,” he explained, “for me to know in spite of everything you wanted to have my child—”

But then she turned and looked at him, and the captain saw the unexpected information that was in his wife’s face.

“Oh, I see,” he said, no longer flattered at all.

World Vast, World Various

by Gregory Benford

1. The Cusp Moment

The vortex wind roiled stronger, howled across the jagged peaks to the south, and provoked strange wails as it rushed toward the small band of humans.

The sounds seemed to Miyuki like a chorus of shrill, dry voices. Three hundred kilometers to the south these winds were born, churned up by the tidal surges of the brother planet overhead. Across vacant plains they came singing, over rock sculpted into sleek submission by the raw winds. Gusts tore at the twenty-three Japanese in their air masks and thick jackets. A dusty swirl bedeviled them with its grit, then raced on.

“They’re coming,” Tatsuhiko said tensely.

Miyuki squinted into the cutting cold. She could barely see dots wavering amid the billows of dust. In her rising excitement she checked again her autocam, belt holdings, even her air hoses. Nothing must go wrong, nothing should steal one moment from this fresh contact between races. The events of the next hour would be studied by future generations, hallowed and portentous. As a geophysicist, her own role was minor. Their drills had taught her to keep Tatsuhiko and the other culture specialists in good view of her autocam, without being herself conspicuous. Or so they hoped. What if beings born of this austere place found smell, not sight, conspicuous?

“They’re spreading out,” Tatsuhiko said, standing stick-straight. “A sign of hostility? Maneuver?”

Opinions flowed over their suit comm. Tatsuhiko brushed aside most of them. Though she could not see his face well, she knew well the lean contours of concern that would crease his otherwise smooth, yellowish complexion. Miyuki kept silent, as did all those not versed in the con-summate guesswork that its practitioners called Exo-Analysis.

The contact team decided that the Chujoans might have separated in their perpetual quest for small game. This theory seemed to gain confirmation as out of the billowing dust came a peri and two burrowbunnys, scampering before the advancing line. The nomads doggedly pursued, driving game before them, snaring some they took by surprise.

I hope they don’t mind an interrupted hunt, Miyuki thought. They seemed stolid, as if resigned to the unre-lenting hardship of this cruelly thin world. Then she caught herself: Don’t assume. That was the first rule here.

She had seen the videos, the scans from orbit, the an-alytical studies of their movements—and still the aliens startled her.

Their humanoid features struck her first: thin-shanked legs; calves muscled and quick; deep chests broad with fat; arms that tapered to four-fingered hands. But the rest...

Scalloped ears perched nearly atop the large, oval head. Eyes were consumed by their pupils. A slitted mouth like a shark’s, the rictus grin of an uncaring carnivore. Yet she knew they were omnivores—had to be, to survive in this bleak biosphere. The hands looked wrong—blue fin-gernails, ribbed calluses, and the first and last fingers both were double-jointed thumbs.

These features she took in, as the aliens strode forward in their odd, graceful way. Three hundred and twenty-seven of them, one of the largest bands yet seen. The wind brought their talk to her from half a kilometer away. Trills, twitterings, lacings of growls. Were they warning each other?

“Showing signs of regrouping,” Tatsuhiko called edgily.

As leader of the contact team, he had to anticipate trouble of any sort. The aliens were turning to bring the vector of their march directly into the center of the humans. Miyuki edged into a low gully, following the team’s direc-tives. Swiftly the Japanese formed a triangular pattern, Tat-suhiko at the point.

To him went the honor of the cusp moment.

The pale morning light outlined the rumpled peaks to the west, turning the lacy brushwork of high fretted clouds into a rosy curtain, and their light cast shadows into the faces of the approaching aliens.

Miyuki was visible only to a few of the tall, swaying shapes as they made their wary way. She thought at first that they were being cautious, perhaps were fearful, but then she remembered the videos of similar bands. They perpetually strode with an open gait, ready to bound after game if it should appear, eyes roving in a slow search pat-tern. These were no different.

With gravity fifteen percent less than Earth’s, these creatures had a graceful, liquid stride on their two curiously hooflike feet. They held lances and clubs and slingshots casually, seemingly certain that whatever these waiting strangers might be, weaponry could keep them at bay. They were only a few hundred meters away now, and she felt her breathing tighten.

Chujo’s thin, chilly air plucked at her. She wondered if it affected her eyes, because now she could see the aliens’ clothing—and it was moving.

They wore a kind of living skin that adjusted to each change in the cant of their arms, each step. The moving brown stuff tucked closely at neck and armpits and groin, where heat loss would be great, yet left free the long arms and muscled thighs. Could such primitives master biotech capable of this? Or had they domesticated. some carpetlike animal?

No time left for speculations. Her comm murmured with apprehension as the nearest alien stolidly advanced to within a hundred meters.

“Remember Kammer,” one of the crew observed laconically.

“Remember your duty!” Tatsuhiko countered sharply.

Miyuki’s vision sharpened to an unnatural edge. She had a rising intuition of something strange, something none of them had—

“Tatsuhiko,” she called. “Do not step in front of them.”

“What?” Tatsuhiko answered sharply as the leading alien bore down upon him. “Who said that? I—”

And the moment had arrived.

Tatsuhiko stood frozen.

The face of the truly alien. Crusty-skinned. Hairless. Scaly slabs of flesh showing age and wear. The alien turned its head as it made its long, loping way by Tatsuhiko. Its skin was fretted, suggesting feathers, with veins beneath the rough hide making a lacework of pink, as in the feet of some earthly birds. And the eyes—swollen pupils giving the impression of intense concentration, swiveling across the landscape in smooth unconcern.

The alien rotated its torso—a flickering of interest?—as it passed. Tatsuhiko raised a bare hand in a sign they had all agreed had the best chance of being read as a non-hostile greeting, Tatsuhiko smiled, careful to not reveal white teeth, in case that implied eating or anger among beings who shared a rich lore of lipped mouths.

To this simple but elaborately rehearsed greeting the alien gave Tatsuhiko a second’s further gaze—and then strode on, head turning to scan the ground beyond.

And so they all came on. No sounds, no trace of the talk the Japanese had recorded from directional mikes. The second alien drew abreast Captain Koremasa Tam-ura, the expedition leader. This one did not register Kore-masa with even the slightest hesitation in the regular, smooth pivot of its head.

So came the next. And the next.

The Chujoans pressed forward, nomads in search of their next meal. Miyuki remembered the videos taken from orbit of just this, remorseless sweeping hunt. Only the first of them had permitted its gaze to hesitate for even a moment.

“I ...I do not...” Tatsuhiko whispered over comm. The aliens swept by the humans, their eyes neither avoiding recognition nor acknowledging it.

“Do not move,” Koremasa ordered.

Even so, one woman named Akiko was standing nearly directly in front of an approaching’

Chujoan—and she lifted a palm in a gesture that might have meant greet-ing but Miyuki saw as simple confusion. It brushed the passing alien. Akiko clutched suddenly at the Chujoan hand, seeking plaintively.

The creature gave no notice, allowing its momentum to carry it forward, freeing its hand.

Koremasa sharply reprimanded Akiko, but Miyuki took little notice of that, or of the buzzing talk on her comm. She hugged herself against the growing chill, turned away from the cutting winds, and watched the aliens con-tinue on, unhurried. Hundreds of evenly spaced, oblivious hunters. Some carried heavy packs while others—thin, wiry, carrying both slings and lances—had little. But they all ignored the humans.

“Anyone registering eye contact?—Tatsuhiko asked ‘ tersely.

The replies trickled in reluctantly. No. No one. “How do they know?” Tatsuhiko asked savagely.

“The first, it looked at me. Then the rest, they just—just—” Faintly someone said, “They won’t even piss on us.” Another whisper answered, “Yes, the ultimate insult.” Chuckles echoed, weak and indecisive against the strong, unending alien wind.

The humans stood in place, automatically awaiting or-ders, as endless drill had fashioned them to do.

Dust devils played among them. A crusty-skinned thing the first ex-pedition had unaccountably named a snakehound on the basis of a few glimpses on their video records—though it showed no signs of liking the fat worms that resembled Earthly snakes—came bounding by, eluding the hunters.

Likewise, it took no apparent notice of the humans frozen in their carefully planned deployment of greeting, of con-tact, of the cusp, moment.

In their calm exit Miyuki saw her error, the mistake of the entire crew. These Chujoans had two hands, two feet, binocular eyes—piimatelike, city-builders, weapon-users. Too close to human, far too close.

For they were still alien. Not some pseudo-Navajos. Not more shambling near-apes who had meandered out of the forest, patching and adding to their cerebral architec-ture, climbing up the staircase of evolution toward a self-proclaimed, seemingly ordained success.

These beings shared no genes, nor assumptions, nor desires, with the seemingly similar humans. Their easy sway, their craftily designed slingshots and arrows—all came from unseen anvils of necessity that humans might not share at all.

She leaned back, smothering an impulse to laugh. The releasP of tension brought, a mad hilarity to her thoughts, but she immediately suppressed the urge to shout, to ges-ture, to stamp her boots into the dusty certainties of this bleak plain. After all, Tatsuhiko had not given the order to disperse the pattern—he was stiff with shock.

Perhaps this sky gave a clue. How different from Earth! Genji loomed, a great mottled ball fixed at the top of the sky.

How well she knew the stories of the Genji Mono-gatari, by the great Murasaki. Yet the imposition of a mil-lennium-old tale on these hard, huge places was perhaps another sign of their underlying arrogance.

The whirl of worlds, she thought. Spheres stuck at the ends of an invisible shaft, balls twin-spinning about each other. Tidal stresses forced them to eternal mutual regard, rapt, like estranged lovers unable to entertain the warmer affections of the swollen, brooding sun that even now sought to come onstage, brimming above the horizon, cast-ing slanting exaggerated shadows. The aliens headed into this ruddy dawnlight, leaving the humans without a back-ward glance.

2. Arrested Athens

They took refuge in the abandoned cities. Not for physical shelter, for eat was provided by the transparent, millimeter-thin, yet rugged bubbles they inflated among the ruins. They came here to gain some psychological consolation, for reasons no one could quite express.

Miyuki sat in one of the largest bubbles, sipping on aromatic Indian tea and cracking seeds between her teeth. So far these small, tough, oddly sweet kernels were the only bounty of this dry planet. Miyuki had been the first to mas-ter them, cracking them precisely and then separating the meat from the pungent shell with her tongue. Gathering them from the low, gnarled trees was simple. They hung in opulent, unpicked bunches; apparently the Chujoans did not like them. Still, it would be interesting to see if anyone without other food could eat the seeds quickly enough to avoid starvation.

The subject never came up, she realized, because no one liked to jest about real possibilities. The entire expe-dition was still living off the growing tanks on the mother ship. Every kilogram of protein and carbohydrate had to be brought down with many more kilos of liquid hydrogen fuel. That in turn had to be separated from water on Genji, where their main base sprawled beside a rough sea.

Such weighty practicalities suppressed humor. Not that this crew was necessarily a madcap bunch, of course. Mi-yuki spat her cheekful of shells into her hand, tossed them into the trash, and started listening to Tatsuhiko again. He had never been a mirthful man, and had not responded well to her suggestion that perhaps the Chujoans had played a sort of joke.

“—so I remain astonished by even the suggestion that their behavior was rooted in anything so obvious,” Tatsu-hiko concluded.

“As obvious as a joke?” Captain Koremasa asked blandly. He sat while the others stood, a remnant of ship-board discipline. The posture was probably unnecessary, for the captain was already the tallest and most physically com-manding figure in the expedition. Standard primate hierar-chy rules, Miyuki thought distantly. Koremasa had a broad forehead and strong features, a look of never being sur-prised.

All quite useful in instilling confidence.

“A joke requires context,” Tatsuhiko said, his mouth contracting into tight reserve. He was lean and angular, muscles bunching along his long jawline. She knew the energies that lurked there. She had had a brief, passionate affair with him and could still remember his flurries of anx-ious attention.

Partly out of mischief, she said, “They may have had enough ‘context’ for their purposes.–

Tatsuhiko’s severe mouth turned down in scorn. “That band knew nothing of prior contact—that was why we se-lected them!”

“How do you know?” Miyuki asked mildly.

Tatsuhiko crossed his arms, energies bundled in. “First contact was with a band over three thousand kilo-meters from here. We tracked them.”

Miyuki said, “Stories fly fast.”

“Across a mountain range?’

“In months, yes.”

“These are primitives, remember. No signs of writing, of metallurgy, of plowing. Thus, almost certainly no infor-mation technology. No semaphore stations, no roads, not even smoke signals.”

“Gossip is speedy,” Miyuki said. The incredible, ir-rational, and cowardly withdrawal of the first expedition had left Chujo for the Japanese, a slate virtually unblem-ished. But in the time since, the Chujoans might have turned that first contact into legend.

“We must go by what we know, not what we invent.” Tatsuhiko kept his tone civil, but the words did his work for him.

“And I am a geophysicist and you are the culture spe-cialist.” Miyuki looked at him squarely, an unusual act among a crew trained for decades to suppress dissension.

“I believe no one should proceed to theory without more experience,” Koremasa said evenly. His calm eyes seemed to look through them and out, into the reaches be-yond. She caught a sense of what it was like to have more responsibility than others, but to be just as puzzled. Kore-masa’s years of quiet, stolid leadership on the starship had not prepared him well for ambiguity.

Still, his sign of remote displeasure made both Miyuki and Tatsuhiko hesitate, their faces going blank.

After a mo-ment Tatsuhiko nodded abruptly and said, “Very much so.’

‘

They automatically shifted to routine matters to defuse any tensions. Familiar worries about food, air, illness, and fatigue surfaced, found at least partial solutions. Miyuki played her part as supplies officer, but she let her mind wander as Tatsuhiko and Koremasa got into a long discus-sion of problems with their pressure masks.

They had retreated into studying artifacts; after all, that is what archaeologists were trained to do, and artifacts could not ignore you. Two women had trailed the Chujoans for several kilometers, and found what appeared to be a discarded or forgotten garment, a frayed legging, The bi-ologists and Exo-Analysis people had fallen upon it with glad cries.

Quite quickly they showed that the snug-rug, as some called it, was in fact a sophisticated life-form that seemed bioengineered to parasitic perfection, for the sole purpose of helping the Chujoans fend off the elements. It lived on excrement and sweat—“biological exudates,” the special-ists’ jargon said. The mat was in fact a sort of biological corduroy, mutually dependent species like small grasses, moss, and algal filaments. They gave back to their host warmth and even a slow, steady massage. They even cleaned the skin they rode—“dermal scavenging,” the spe-cialists termed it. Useful traits—and better than any Earthly gadget.

The specialists in Low Genji Orbit had labored to duplicate the snug-rug in their laboratories. The expedition depended on powerful biotech resources, for everything from meals to machine repair. But the snug-rug proved a puzzle. The specialists were, of course, quite sure they could crack the secret... but it would require a bit of time. They seemed equally divided on the, issue of whether the snug-rug was a remnant from an earlier biotech civilization, or another example of evolution’s incredible diplomacy among species.

Appetites whetted by one artifact, the team turned to the province of archaeology. The abandoned cities that dot-ted Chujo were mostly rubble, but some like this—Miyuki glanced out through the transparent bubble wall—still soared, their creamy massive walls blurred by winds until they resembled partly melted ice-cream sculptures. Little metal had gone into them, apparently not needed because of the milder gravity. Perhaps that was why later ages had not plundered these canyonlike streets for all the threads of decorative tin and copper. Sand, frost, storm, invading de-sert brush—all had conspired to rub away most of the stone sheaths on the grander buildings, so little art remained. Ko-remasa and Tatsuhiko went on discussing matters, but Mi-yuki had heard the same debates before; one of the mild irritations of the expedition was that Koremasa still sought consensus, as though, they were still packed into a starship, mindful of every frown. No, here they needed daring; lead-ership, dash and verve.

At the right moment she conspicuously bowed, exag-gerating her leave-taking just enough for a slight ironic ef-fect, and slipped through the pressure lock.

She slipped her pressure mask on, checked seals, tasted the slightly :oily compressed air. This was the one huge freedom they had missed so much on the long voyage out: to slam the door on exasperation. There had been many elaborate ways to defuse stresses, such as playing smash-ball; the object was to keep the ball aloft as long as pos-sible, not to better your opponent. Long rallies, cooperation, learning to compensate for inability or momentary fault, deploring extravagant impulse and grandstanding—all good principles, when you are going lonely to the stars. They had similarly lasted through their predicted season of sexual cookbook athletics. The entire team was like an old married couple by now—wise and weathered.

The chilly bite of even noonday never failed to take her by surprise. She set off quickly, still enjoying the spring that low gravity gave to her step, and within minutes was deep among the maze of purple-gray colonnades. Orbital radar had deepscanned the sandy wastes and found this bur-ied city. Diggers and wind machines had revealed elegant, airy buildings preserved far better than the weathered hov-els found on the exposed surface. Had the city been delib-erately buried? The street-filling sands had been conspicuously uniform and free of pebbles, not the residue of eons of runoff from nearby hills. Buried for what?

The moody, shadowed paths gave abruptly into hex-agonal spaces of pink flagstones. Above, high-pitched roofs and soaring towers poked into a thin blue sky that sported small, quickly scudding clouds like strands of wool. To her eye the styles here, when they struck any human resonance at all, were deliberate blends, elements of artful slope and balanced mass that made the city seem like, an anthology of ages. Could this be the last great gathering place of the ancient natives, erected to pay tribute to their passing great-ness? Did they know that the ebbing currents of moisture and dusty ice storms were behind the ceaseless slow drying that was trimming their numbers, narrowing the pyramid of life upon which all large omnivores stood? They must have, she concluded.

In this brooding place of arched stone and airy reces-ses there came to her a silky sense of melancholy, of stately recessional. They had built this elaborately carved and fret-ted stonework on the edge of what must have then been a large lake. Now the diminished waters were briny, hemmed in by marshes prickly with bamboolike grasses. Satellites had found larger ruined cities among the slopes of the many mountain ranges, ones displaying large public areas, per-haps stadiums and theaters—but humans could not bear those altitudes without bulky pressure suits. She coughed, and remembered to turn up the burbling humidifier, in her air feed. There was enough oxygen here, five hundred meters above what passed for sea level on a world where the largest sea was smaller than many of Earth’s lakes. But the air stole moisture from sinuses and throat, making her skin prickly and raw.

Miyuki peered up, past the steepled roofs and their caved-in promise, at the perpetual presence of Genji. Ge-ometry told her that at noon the brother world should be dark, but the face of milky swirls and clumpy browns glowed, reflecting Chujo’s own radiance. Even the mot-tlings in the shadowed and strangely sinister face of Chu-jo’s brother seemed to have a shifting, elusive character as she watched.

Genji loomed twelve times larger than the moon she had known as a child in Kyoto, and at night it gave hundreds of times as much light, enough to read by, enough to pick out colors in the plains of Chujo.

Now high cirrus of glittery powdered ice momentarily veiled it in the purpling sky, but that somber face would never budge from its hovering point at the top of the sky. A moist, warm, murky sphere. How had that richness overhead affected the Chujoans, through the long millennia when they felt the thieving dryness creeping into their forests, their fields, their lives?

She turned down a rutted path beside a crumbled wall, oicking her way, and before her a shadowy form moved. She froze. They all wore the smell-dispersers that suppos-edly drove off even large predators, but this shape

“We should not be alone here,” Tatsuhiko said, his eyes hooded behind his pressure mask.

“You frightened me!”

“Perhaps a little fear would be wise.”

“Fear is disabling,” she said disdainfully.

“Fear kindles caution. This world is too Earthlike-it lulls us.”

“Lrulls? I have to fight for oxygen when I trot, we all scratch from the aridity, the cold seeps in—”

“It deceives us, still.”

“You were the one maintaining that the natives couldn’t possibly be joking with us, or—”

“I apologize for my seeming opposition.” Tatsuhiko bowed from the waist.

She started to reply, but his gesture reminded her sud-denly of moments long ago—times when the reserve be-tween them had broken in a sudden flood, when everything important had not seemed to require words at all, when hands and mouths and the simple slide of skin on welcom-ing skin had seemed to convey more meaning than all the categories and grammars of their alert, managerial minds. Times long gone.

She wondered whether Koremasa had delicately im-plied that Tatsuhiko should follow her, mend fences. Per haps—but this perpetual wondering whether people truly spoke their minds, or merely what solidarity of effort re-quired—it provoked her! Still ... she took the space of a heartbeat to let the spurt of irritation evaporate into the chilly air.

She sighed and allowed herself only a sardonic “You merely seemed to differ?”

—I merely expressed the point of view of my profes-sion.” Tatsuhiko gave her a direct, professional smile.

Despite herself, Miyuki grinned. “You were an enthu-siastic advocate of sociobiology, weren’t you?”

“Still am.” His heavy-lidded eyes studied her. The age-old male gaze, straying casually away for a quite un-conscious study of what the contours of her work suit implied, a subtle tang of the matters between men and women that would never be settled ... not that anyone wished them to be.

She nodded briskly, suddenly wanting to keep their discussion businesslike. “I suppose we are all at the fore-front of our fields, simply by being here. Even though we haven’t kept up, with Earthside literature.”

Communicating with Earth had proved to be even more difficult than they had imagined. In flight the hot plasma exhaust tail had blurred and refracted transmissions. Further, the Doppler shift had reduced the bit rate from Earth by half. Few dry academic journals had made it through.

Tatsuhiko’s blunt jaw shifted slightly sidewise, which she knew promised a slightly patronizing remark. He said, “Of course, you are on firmer ground.”

“Oh? How?”

“Planetary geology cannot falsify so easily, I take it.”

“I don’t understand.” Or are we both sending mixed signals? Then, to shake him a little, she asked liltingly, “Would you like a drink?”

“I wished to walk the city a bit, as you were.”

“Oh, this is in the city. We don’t have to return to camp. Come.”

She deliberately took him through galleries of stone that seemed feather-light, suspended from thick walls by small wedges of pale rock; the sight was still unsettling, to one born to greater gravity. She padded quickly along pre-carious walkways teetering above brackish ponds, and then, with no time for eyes to adjust, through murky tunnels. A grove of spindly trees surrounded a round building of burnt-orange rock, breezes stirring from them a sound like fat sizzling on a stove. She stopped among them, looking for damp but firm sand. Without saying a word in answer to his puzzled expression, she dug with her hands a hole a palm wide and elbow-deep.

“Wet gravel,” she said, displaying a handful. He looked puzzled. Did he know that this made him boyish and vulnerable? She would not put that past him; he was an instinctive analyzer. Once he had tried with her all the positions made possible by the short period when the star-ship had glided under low deceleration—penetrating her in mechanical poses of cartoonish angles, making her laugh and then, in short order, come hard and swiftly against him. Where was that playful man now?

On alien ground, she knew. Preoccupied by the central moment of his life. And she could not reach out to touch him here, any more than she had the last few years on board.

The stand of pale-yellow reeds she had noticed the day before nearly blocked the building’s ample arched door-way. She broke off two, one fat and the other thin. Using the smaller as a ramrod, she punched the pith from the larger. Except for some sticking at the joints it worked, and she thanked her memory of this trick.

“A siphon,” she said, plunging the larger reed into the sand hole and formally offering it to Tatsuhiko.

A bit uncertainly Tatsuhiko sucked on this natural straw, his frown turning to surprised pleasure.

“It works. Ground water—not salty.”

“I tire of the processed taste in our water. I learned this on one of our desert classes.” Pre-expedition training had been a blizzard of facts, techniques, gadgets, lore—all predicated on the earliest data from the probes, most of it therefore only marginally relevant; planets proved to be even more complex systems than they had suspected.

He watched her carefully draw the cool, smelly, oddly pleasant water up and drink long and steadily.

The very air here robbed the skin of moisture, and their dry throats were feasting grounds for the head colds that circulated among the crew.

“This unfiltered water should be harmless, I sup-pose,” he said hesitantly, his face turning wary too late.

She laughed. “You’ve already got a bellyful of any microbe that can feast off us.”

“I thought there weren’t any such.”

,

“So it seems.”

Indeed, this was the most convincing proof that pan-spermia, the seeding of the galaxy by spores from a single planet, had never happened. Chujo and Genji shared a basic reproducing chain, helical like DNA but differing in ele-mental details. Somehow the two worlds had shared bio-logical information.

The most likely explanation lay in debris thrown out by meteorite bombardment through ge-ological time scales, which then peppered the other planet. She saw his familiar self-involved expression and added,

“But, of course, we’ve only covered a tiny fraction of Chujo yet.”

His look of dismay made her suppress another laugh. Specialization was so intense among them!

Tatsuhiko did not realize that biospheres were thoroughly mixed, and that the deep, underlying incompatibility of Chujoan microbes with Earthly biochemistry was a planetwide feature. “I’m just fooling, Tatsuhiko-san,” she said, putting stress on the more friendly form of address.

“Ah.” Abrupt nod of head, tight jaw, a few seconds to recover his sense of dignity. There had been a time when he reacted with amusement to her jibes. Or rolled her over and pinned her and made her confess to some imaginary slight, laughing.

They walked on, unspoken elements keeping them at a polite distance. She fetched forth a knife and cut a few notches in the soft length of the reed. As they walked she slipped the tip of the reed under her mask and blew through this crude recorder, making notes oddly reminiscent of the stern, plaintive call of the ancient Japanese country flute, the shakuhachi. She had played on such hastily made in-struments while a young, girl, and these bleak, thin-textured sounds took her back to a life that now seemed inconceivably, achingly remote—and was, of course. Prob-ably few of them would ever walk the soil of the Home Islands again. Perhaps none.

They wandered among the tumbled-down lofts and deeply cut alcoves, Miyuki’s music echoing from ruined walls. Here they passed through—streets—that were in fact pathways divided by thin partitions of gray-green stone, smoothed by wind and yet still showing the serpentine elab-oration of colors—maroon, rose, aqua—inlaid by hands over ten thousand years ago. The dating was very impre-cise, of course.

Weaker planetary magnetic shielding, a dif-ferent sun, an unknown climate history—all made the standard tables of carbon dating irrelevant.

Tatsuhiko raised his hand, and they stopped before a worn granite wall. Deeply carved into it was one of the few artworks remaining in the city, perhaps because it could not be carried away. She estimated it was at least a full Chu-joan’s height on each of its square sides.

She followed the immense curves of the dune tiger. Only twice had any human glimpsed this beast in the flesh. The single photograph they had showed a muscular; can-vas-colored, four-legged killing machine. Its head was squat, eyes enormous, mouth an efficient V design. Yet the beast had a long, sensuous tail thickly covered with gray-green scales. Intricate, barbed, its delicate scales almost seemed like feathers.

The ancient artist had taken this striking feature and stretched it to provide the frame and the substance of his work. The dune tiger’s tail flowed out of the beast—which glowered at the viewer, showing teeth—into a wraparound wreath that grew gnarled branches, sprouted ample flowers, and then twisted about itself to form the unmistakable pro-file of an alert Chujoan native.

The strange face also looked at the viewer, eyes even larger than the reality Miyuki had seen, mouth agape, head cocked at an angle. Miyuki would never know if this was a comic effect, but it certainly looked that way. And the sinuous tail, having made this head, wriggled around the design—to be eaten by the tiger itself.

“Writhing at the pain of biting itself?” she whispered.—That could be. But wouldn’t the whole tiger struggle, not just the tail?”

“Unless the tiger has just this instant bitten itself.” ‘Ummm, I hadn’t thought of that. A snapshot, an’

in-stant frozen in time.”

She fingered her reed. “But then why does its tail make that face?”

“Why indeed? I feel so empty before this work. We can bring so little to it!” He gestured angrily.

“The archaeologists, they must have some idea.”

“Oh, they suppose much. But they know little.”

She followed the tiger’s tail with her eyes, looking fruitlessly for some clue. “This city had so many things ours do.”

“But were they used the same way? The digging team hasn’t found a single grave. Most of what we know about ancient Earth comes from burial of the dead.”

She touched the stone, found its cool strength oddly reassuring. “This has outlasted the pyramids.”

“Maybe it was cut very deep?”

“No ... How long it has been buried we cannot tell. And Chujo’s lighter gravity should lead to less erosion, generally. But I would have expected the winds to rub this out.”

Tatsuhiko shrugged. “Our dating could be wrong, of course.”

“Not this far wrong.” Miyuki frowned. “I wonder if this place was more like an arrested Athens.”

He looked at her speculatively. “A city-state? Difficult to tell, from a ruin.”

“But the Chujoans still camp here—you found their old embers yourself.”

“Until we scared them away, I suppose.”

Miyuki studied the great wall. “You suspect they lin-ger here, to view the ruins of what they were?”

—“They may not be even the same species that built all this.” Tatsuhiko looked around, as if trying to imagine the streets populated, to envision what forms would have am-bled here.

She gestured at small circles that appeared above the carving. “What are these?”

Tatsuhiko frowned. “Symbols?”

“No, they look like a depiction of real objects. See, here’s one that’s a teardrop.”

He stooped to examine the wall. “Yes, the lowest of them is. And higher up, see. another teardrop, only not so pronounced.”

Miyuki tried to fathom some sense to the round gouges. If the piece had perspective, the circles could be of any true size. “Teardrop at the bottom ... and as they rise, they round out?”

Tatsuhiko shrugged. “Rain droplets form round in the air, I believe, then make teardrops as they fall.”

“Something the tiger gives off?”

“How?”

His questions were insightful, but there was something more here, she was sure of it. Her mother had once told her that art could touch secret places. She had described it in terms of simple events of childhood. When the summer rain had possi.d and the air was cool, when your affairs were few and your mind was at ease, you listened to the lingering notes of some neighbor’s flute chasing after the clear clouds and the receding rain, and every note seemed to drop and sink into your soul. That was how it was now, this moment, without explanations.

Miyuki let the moment pass. Tatsuhiko gave up in exasperation. “Come—let’s walk.”

She wanted to move through the city as though she had once been a citizen of it, to catch some fleeting fra-grance of lives once lived.

They walked on. She blew into her crude recorder again.

To her the atonal, clear, crude tones seemed to mirror the strangely solid feel of this place, not merely the veiled city of opaque purpose but as well the wind-carved desert wastes surrounding it. Motionless and emotionless, at one moment both agonised and deeply still.

“Perhaps that would be better to send back,” Tatsu-hiko said suddenly.

“What?”

“Better than our precious reports. Instead, transmit to Earth such music. It conveys more than our data, our meas-urements, our... speculations.”

She saw through his guarded expression—tight jaw-line, pensive lips, veiled eyes—how threatened Tatsuhiko felt. The long voyage out had not made every member of the 482 crew familiar to her, and she and Tatsuhiko had always worked in different chore details, but still she knew the character-indices of them all. Crew had to fit within the narrow avenue that had allowed them to withstand the grand, epic voyage, and not decay into the instabilities that the sociometricians had so tellingly predicted.

Tatsuhiko had lost great face in that abortive first en-counter, and three other attempts by his team to provoke even a flicker of recognition from the Chujoans had failed just as miserably.

Yet it would not do to address Tatsuhiko directly on this issue, to probe in obvious fashion his deepest insecur-ities. “You have illuminated a principal feature of their character, after all. That is data.”

He snorted derisively. “Feature? That they do not think us worth noticing?”

“But to take no notice—that is a recognition that says much.– •

Suspiciously: “What?”

“That they know our strangeness. Respect it.”

“Or hold it in contempt.”

“That is possible.”

His face suddenly opened, the tight lines around his eyes lightening. “I fear I have been bound in my own dis-cipline too much.”

“Sociobiology?”

“Yes. We attempt to explain social behavior as arising from a species’ genetic heritage. But here—the categories we ourselves bring are based on a narrowing of definitions, all accomplished by our own brains—wads of gray matter themselves naturally, selected for. We cannot use words like ‘respect’

or ‘contempt.’ They are illusions here.”

She frowned. “In principle, of course. But these na-tives, they are so like ourselves.... “

Tatsuhiko chuckled. “Oh? Come tomorrow, we’ll go into the field. I’ll show you the proud Chujoans.”

3. So-So Biology

They squatted in a blind, peer-ing through a gauzy, dim dawn.

Recently cut branches hid them from the roaming an-imals beyond. can’t see anything.” Miyuki shifted to get a better view of the plain. Scraggly gray trees dotted it and, low, powder-blue brush clung to the gullies.

Tatsuhiko gestured. “Look on the infra monitor.” He fiddled, sharpening the image.

She saw a diffuse glow about half a kilometer away. It was, near a snaky stream that had cut deeply into the broad, flat valley. “Something killed a kobold last night?”

Tatsuhiko nodded. “Probably a ripper. Our sensors gave us an audio signature. Picked it up on omni and then focused automatically with a directional mike.”

“Could it have been a dune tiger?”

“Don’t know.” He studied her face. “You’re still thinking about the carving.”

“It is beautiful,” she said quickly, embarrassed for reasons she could not fathom.

“Indeed.” His quick eyes gave nothing away. “The kobold kill is scenting in the air, and this breeze will carry it. We now wait to see what the Chupchups do.”

“They call each other Chupchups?”

“We have analyzed their voice patterns. No clear syn-tax yet, of course. We aren’t even sure of many words. We noticed that they make flamelike sounds—preess-chupcitup, for example—they always end in that phrase.”

“Perhaps it means ‘Mister.’ Or ‘Honorable.”‘

He shrugged. “Better than calling them ‘apes,’ as some crew have started to do.”

She sat back, thighs already aching from squatting, and breathed in the dry aroma of the hunting, ground. It was like Africa, she thought, with its U-shaped valleys cut by meandering rivers, the far ramparts of fault blocks being worn down by windblown sand. Only this world was far more bleak, cold, eerie in its shadows cast by the great sun now rising.

This star always made her uneasy when it ponderously rose or set, for the air’s refraction flattened it.

Filling four times as much of the sky as the sun she knew, it was none-theless a midget, with a third the mass of Sol. Though the astronomers persisted in calling Murasaki a red dwarf, it was no dull crimson ember.

In the exalted hierarchy of solar specialists, stars like this one, with surface temperature greater than a carbon-filament incandescent lamp, were nonetheless minor luke-warm bores. Had they been rare, astronomers might have studied them more before the discovery of life here. Though Murasaki sported sunspots and vibrant orange flares, its glow did not seem reddish to her, but rather yellow.

The difference from Sol became apparent as she squinted at the carrion awaiting the dawn’s attentions. De-tail faded in the distance, despite the thin air, because there was no more illumination than in a well-lit Earthly living room after dark. Only as this swollen sun rose did it steal some of the attention from Genji, which perched always directly above, splitting the sky with its sardonic half-moon grin.

“Here come the first,” Tatsuhiko whispered tensely. His eyes danced with anticipation. When she saw him like this it was as if his formal skin had dissolved, giving her the man she had known.

A fevered giggling came over the chilly plain. Distant forms scampered: small tricorns, running from a snake-hound. Their excited cries seemed nearly human. As they outdistanced, the snakehound, which had sprung from con-cealment too soon, they sounded as though they laughed in derision. A helibat flapped into view, drawn by the noise, and scooped up a burrowbunny that appeared to be just waking up as it stood at the entrance of its hole.

Then she saw the band of low shapes gathering where the kobold carcass lay. They were hangmouths—ugly hyenalike beasts that drooled constantly, fought each other over their food, and never hunted. These scavengers dis-membered the kobold as she watched, hunching forward with the rest of the survey team. Short, snarling squabbles came over the audios.

“Vicious,” she whispered, despite her resolution to say nothing about others’ specialties.

“Of course,” one of the team said analytically. “This is an ecology being slowly ground down by its biosphere. Hard times make hard species.”

She shivered, not entirely from the dawn chill.

As they watched, other teams reported that a party of Chujoans was headed this way. Tatsuhiko’s team had tracked these Chujoans, noted the kobold kill, and now awaited their collision with the squinting intensity of an author first watching his play performed.

Miyuki could not see the Chupchups at all. The grad-ual warming of the valley brought tangy suggestions of straw-flavored vegetation, pungent meat rotting, the reek of fresh feces.

Tatsuhiko asked over comm, “Team C—have you counted them yet?”

The reply came crisply. “Eight. Three female adult, three male, two children.”

“Any displays that show parental investment?”

“Males carry the children.”

Tatsuhiko nodded. “It’s that way in all groups smaller than a hundred. Interesting.”

“What do those groups do?” Miyuki asked. “Food gathering.”

One of the team, Hayaiko, said, “You should look at that data on incest avoidance. Very convincing.

Female children are separated from the male in an elaborate cere-mony, given special necklaces, the entire panoply of effects.”

Tatsuhiko pursed his lips. “Don’t deduce too much too soon. They might have been marrying them off, for all we know.”

Hayaiko blinked. “At age four?”

“Check our own history. We’ve done about the same not that long ago,” Tatsuhiko said with a grin.

He seemed relaxed, affable, a natural leader, but undercurrents played in his face.

She saw that he was no longer beset by doubt, as he had been in pensive moments in the ancient city.

He would redouble his efforts, she saw, summon up more gaman, the famed dogged persistence that had made Japan the leader of the world. Or did he aspire higher, to gaman-zuyoi, he-roic effort?

“The Chupchups are creeping up on the carrion.” came a comm message.

“They’ll fight the hangmouths?” Miyuki asked. “We’ll see,– Tatsuhiko said.

She caught sight of the aliens then, moving in a squat-walk as they left a gully and quickly crossed to another. Their zigzag progress over the next half hour was wary, tediously careful as they took advantage of every tuft of grass, every slope, for concealment. She began to look for-ward to a fight with the hangmouths as their continuing snarls and lip-smacking over the audio told of the slow devouring of the carcass. It was, of course, quite unprofes-sional to be revolted by the behavior of species they had come so far to study, but she could not help letting her own delicate personal habits bring a curl of disgust to her lips.

“They’re leaving,” comm called.

The hangmouths began to stray from the carcass. “Picked it clean,” Tatsuhiko said.

The Chupchups ventured closer. The two children darted in to the kill, dodged rebuffs from the larger hang-mouths, and snatched away some carelessly dropped sliver—like pauper children at a land baron’s picnic, Miyuki thought, in the days of the Shogunate. This intru-sion seemed to be allowed, but when the adults crept closer a hangmouth turned and rushed at the leading Chupchup. It scampered back to safety, despite the fact that it carried a long pointed stick. It held the stick up as if to show the hangmouth, but the drooling beast still snarled and paced, kicking up curtains of dust, holding the band of Chupchups at bay for long minutes.

“Why don’t they attack it?” she asked.

“I have no idea.” Tatsuhiko studied the scene with binoculars. “Could the stick be a religious implement, not a weapon at all?”

“I do not think it is trying to convert the hangmouth,” Miyuki said severely.

“Along with semantic language, religion is the one accomplishment of humans that has no analogy in the an-imal world,” Tatsuhiko said stiffly. “I wish to know whether it is a biological property here, as it is for us.”

“You believe we genetically evolved religion?”

“Plainly.”

“Oh, come now.”

A flicker of the other man: a quick smile and “Reli-gion is the opiate of the mortal.”

How could he still surprise her, after many years? “You believe, we’ve, had religion so long that it’s buried in our genes?”

“It is not merely a cultural manifestation, or else it would not be universal among us. Incest avoidance is an-other such.”

She blinked. “And morals?”

“Moral pronouncements are statements about genetic-fitness strategies.”

All she could say was, “A severe view.”

“A necessary one. Look there!”

Two hellbats had roosted in trees near the kill site. “Note how they roost halfway down the canopy, rather than in the top. They wish to be close to the game.”

The hangmouth had turned and now, with aloof dis-dain, padded away from the Chupchup and its raised stick. Trotting easily, the hangmouths departed. The Chupchup band ventured forward to the kobold body and began to root among the remains.

Miyuki said, “The hellbats—”

“See what the Chupchups are doing? Breaking open the big thigh bones.” Tatsuhiko pointed to the vision screen, where a full-color picture showed Chupchups greed-ily sucking at the cracked yellow bones..

Miyuki was shocked. “But why, when there’s meat left?”

“The marrow, I suspect. It is rich in calories among the larger species here.”

“But still—”

“The Chupchups prefer the marrow. They have given up on finding fresh meat, for they have given up hunting.”

Tatsuhiko said this dispassionately, but his face wore an expression of abstracted scorn.

With screeches they could hear even at this range, two hellbats launched themselves upon the knot of stooping Chupchups. The large, leathery birds dove together at a Chupchup child that had wandered a few meters from the band. Miyuki watched their glittery, jewellike eyes and bony wings as they slid down the sky.

The first hellbat sank claws into the child and flapped strongly. A male Chupchup threw itself forward, but the second hellbat deflected it. A female Chupchup ran around the male and snatched at the child. The hellbat bit the fe-male deeply as it tried to gain the air, but she clubbed it solidly twice with the flat of her hand. The hellbat dropped the child. It flapped awkwardly away, joined by its partner.

“They nearly got that little one!” Miyuki cried.

“They go for the weaker game.–

“Weaker?– Miyuki felt irritated at Tatsultiko’s cool analysis. “The Chupchups are armed.”

“But they do not use them to hunt the larger game. Or even, it seems, to defend themselves. The only use we have observed for those weapons is the pursuit of small game. Easy prey.”

Miyuki shook her head. “That seems impossible. Why not use them?”

Somehow this direct question shattered Tatsuhiko’s stony scientific distance. “Because they have adapted—downward.”