Lightning flared among the clouds. A line squall swal-lowed vision as it swept up from the south bay.

Byrne re-treated to the cabin. Humans didn’t have Ihrdizuan skins. That rain would be downright painful, striking her. Let Hol-den endure it, since he chose. It roared on the overhead.

The boat pitched and rolled. She was immune to seasick-ness, but dank chill gnawed through her clothes. How had Holden’s wife enjoyed living, existing, in this environment, year upon year upon year?

The record showed the couple seldom taking a vacation among what amenities moonside offered. Well, maybe he wasn’t such a grouch in those days. But he should have seen how Farland was wearing her down. Although no autopsy was done, it was obvious from the laconic statement he entered that her heart gave out. Why hadn’t she quit in time? Didn’t she notice? Did she choose to stay regardless? What for? She’d already lost her child. Did she love Malchiel that much? In God’s name, why?

When the storm had passed and Byrne went back top-side, the sky was half clear. Murasaki light blazed and shat-tered on waves still high. The wind had lessened and warmed, shifting easterly; now the ship yonder must tack across it. Given a thick atmosphere with a steep density gradient, a large bowl among hills often bred its own weather.. Byrne was hungry. She assembled a sandwich from her rations while she spent a little charge on a bottle battery to make some coffee. Just a little; Genjian wilder-nesses taught frugality. The trick was to flash a small amount of water to its boiling point under this pressure, then use that to extract the essence and heat the rest.

No sign of Holden yet. Damn him for’ a lead-plated boor. She squinted against the brilliance around her. Some-thing in the west, an extra turmoil,, a dark movement—Decision. She appropriated a length of line, rigged a safety harness, and climbed the crane. Doing that alone wasn’t the best idea in the universe, when the launch reeled through a good fifteen degrees of arc and the acceleration downward was almost as many meters per square second. The hell with it. If Holden caught her, she’d point out that he ha-bitually went partnerless. She had slung his optical around her neck. Raising it to her eyes, she magnified and amplified.

Yes, a whole school of calves, all sizes up to the one about which the others writhed, dived, made spyhopping-leaps. .. danced? It was much the biggest. Estimating distame as seven klicks, she deemed its length five meters. That was about as large as they got during their thirty-some Earth years of calfhood, she remembered.

Hold on. Wasn’t a black shape bound away from them, toward her? A wake roiled behind its swiftness. That wouldn’t ordinarily happen, as smoothly as himatids moved. A metallic gleam. Uh-huh.

The great Dr. Holden deigned to return. Byrne clambered back down and waited for him. Her back felt stiff enough to ache between the shoulder blades.

The swimmer, half again the man’s length, gripped his belt with six rear arms and towed him. For the most part he was submerged, but his snorkel stuck erect. Thus equipped, he could stay under more deeply than an Ihrdizu. His time must be limited by heat loss, if nothing else, but as he neared she saw that he had changed into a wet suit while she was below. He probably kept it in a locker under a bench, wanting to be prepared for a dive on short notice, and had left his coverall there. Byrne had seen scuba gear in the cabin. With this kind of help, he’d rarely need it. His reports never mentioned such details.

They were altogether impersonal. “It was observed that—”

At the hull, the himatid let go. Treading water, Holden raised an arm. “Thanks, Joshua,” she heard.

So he was capable of gestures toward that species, if not his own. A ripple passed through the broad thinness; a response? Byrne noticed spots of somewhat lighter black scattered along it. By such marks, among other tokens, Holden told his indi-viduals apart. Joshua didn’t turn around. Double-ended, it headed straight back toward the commotion among its kind.

Holden came up the Jacob’s ladder amidships. Water ran off him into the cockpit. The launch absorbed it in the pores of its fabric and spewed it off. Byrne tried for po-liteness. “How did your excursion go?”

–It’s just begun,– he said, no less brusquely than be-fore. “Now, I have to peel this thing off me.”

Byrne grinned. “I’m not shy. If you prefer, I’ll turn my back.”

He acted indifferent. That might well mean he’d rather not display an aging, knobbly frame to a young woman who had no sexual interest in him. Byrne looked outward. Sunlight and cloud shadows swept over the whitecaps. “Would you like me to heat you some soup?” she ven-tured. It was all the food he could take in that helmet of his.

“No. No time. I’ll lose too much as is, letting you off.”

Her fingers closed on the coaming. “What?”

“I’ll transfer you to yonder ship. I know it, a coast-wise packet, it’ll take you ashore. I need to speak with the captain anyway.”

Almost, Byrne swung around and glared. She curbed herself. “Why? Where are you bound?”

“To sea. A piece of serious work ahead. Can’t have an outsider underfoot.”

Byrne clenched her;jaws before she said, “For your information, I’ve been on eleven xenological expeditions, four of them to littorals. You know who Elena Sarbiewski is, I trust. She recommended me for this job. In fact, she talked me into it. I will not get in your way. I may well be of help. Do you want me to enter an honest, complete report on your activities and what they’re worth, or don’t you?”

For the first time, she caught hesitation in his tone. “I didn’t foresee ... what this situation would prove to be. Things may get ... a bit dangerous. No, I don’t question your courage or competence.” Was that reluctance, or was she being unfair? The wet suit smacked on the floor. She heard a locker opened and brisk toweling. “But I am the only man alive who’s got any fractional familiarity with what’s here. Would you want me along in the jungles of Southland when you knew things were about to go critical?”

“Will you explain to me what you mean?”

“It’s—complicated. I’ve learned that this is a special occasion indeed. Call it sacred if you choose. I, well, I’ll have trouble enough avoiding, uh, faux pas. You know nothing about their, their mores.”

Byrne relaxed very slightly. “A point. I can stay well inboard, though.”

“No, no. It’s ... too subtle. That’s part of the reason my reports have grown, uh, brief. What I’m beginning to discover—the language of science doesn’t reach to that sort of thing.”

Byrne nodded. “I can empathize. Among the Ihrdizu, too, we get into areas where all we have is intuition, for whatever little it is worth.”

“Yes,” he said eagerly. “That’s what I meant. You wait ashore. When I get back we can talk at leisure.”

She couldn’t argue. Somehow she didn’t feel he was quite sincere. Hermits got scant practice in lying. However, what could she do? She stared west, marshaling her thoughts.

“I’m ready,” Holden said. She joined him at the wheel. Again he was coveralled. He opened the engine up and steered for the ship. Athwart wild silvery clouds his head, inside the helmet, lifted like a brush-bristling crag. Wind skirled, sharp with salt. Waves crashed.

“Can you tell me anything of what this is about?” Byrne asked.

He scowled forward awhile. When he answered, each word was chosen beforehand. “I suppose you’ve met Christians. But do you know what their faith really is—originally was? Not milksop goodwill and vague self-de-lusions about some pink-and-white hereafter. It was, as stern a religion as Earth ever saw. What it dealt with was death, judgment, and transfiguration.” The majestic phrases rolled off his tongue:— For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.”

A hand chopped air. “Men lived and died by that for centuries before they learned better. Now what if it were true?”

He glanced at her. “I don’t say the himatids have any—thing we’d call a religion. What do we mean by that noise, anyway? But they do know transfiguration, not as some-thing a preacher tells them, not as metaphysical gabble, but a fact. The calf becomes a whale and moves from the tide-water to the deep sea. It is never heard from again, seldom and barely glimpsed. But from it arises the new, blind life, which gains awareness among the calves. What further comes, once the creature swims beyond the horizon?

We’ve read our anthropology, you and I. Can you imagine how it must be not to need myths, because life itself is the myth?”

Her skin tingled. “Rite, of passage,” she whispered.

He nodded. Once more his voice came hoarse and dry. “Solomon, the oldest of them, is going out.

It’s not quite so big yet that it can no longer live in the bay, but it soon will be. And today the carpet whales are passing by, bound for the arctic—which the calves know only is a mystery somewhere northward. Solomon will join them. It is dying as a calf, being born as a whale. Because that is happening right after the tads came ashore, Solomon is—especially blessed. I doubt we have any concept that fits.

“They’ll let me escort him to the pod.”

The wind shrilled.

Byrne’s mind leaped. “Your chance to make contact with the whales?”

“You do catch on fast,” he granted. “Not that I haven’t tried before.”

“I know. You’d go out, and signal them according to what you’d learned from the calves. They ignored you.”

“Correct. My guess is that the personality, the lan-guage, changes even more than the body. They ...

put childish things behind. My attempts at communication mean nothing to them. If I could find one or two that, used to live in Gunnunggung Bay, individuals who actually knew me—that may not be too many years ago for them to remember and be interested. But I never have. A pod keeps moving, and it’s widely dispersed over an enormous area. Long before I get close to more than a few, my fuel runs low and I’ve got to turn back. Today I’ll be with Solomon. I don’t know what difference that will make.

Maybe none. But at least I’ll see something I never did before, and, and Solomon may come ... say hello to me in my boat, when it returns here.”

“Revelations aren’t common in science,” Byrne said. “I envy you this possibility.” She wished she meant that a hundred percent.—It wasn’t his unpleasant character, she told herself. Well, it shouldn’t be.

But he was hiding some-thing from her.

The cruiser met the schooner and matched speed, three meters off. Holden shouted. An Ihrdizu who must be the skipper pushed through several crewfolk at the rail and re-plied. The cries went back and forth. Byrne saw Holden’s fingers whiten on the wheel spokes. What news had he received? What reply did he give? She realized that he could form those sounds better than she when he cared to. Between her own unfamiliarity with the dialect and the noise from sea, wind, creaking tackle, she caught no more than fragments.

He turned to her. “All right,’’ he said. “They’ll take you. Can you get aboard in a sling?” Grimly, she declined to resent that. “Fetch your pack. I’ll transfer it first. Settle yourself in ashore.”

Power-operated, the crane lowered her to the other deck. Nonetheless, she needed agility when everything swung and jerked under Genjian weight. She waved at Hol-den. He sheered off without response. Maybe he hadn’t noticed. His propeller left a white tumult aft as he made for the himatids.

The Rockridge sailors were friendly, excitedly curious. In the three hours that followed, Byrne struggled toward communication with them. Those pilots who had talked more easily in the past knew the patois from which this derived. She did not. Near the end, she had acquired suf-ficient vocabulary that she could ask questions. “What did you tell the male of my kind?” The captain broke in, belch-ing and gobbling words strange to her. Slang? The crew hesitated a moment. Then, oh, yes, they would be delighted to show her around.

She didn’t believe they had misunderstood her. But what was the use? Holden had ordered them to keep mum. They probably didn’t know why. That the trade goods came through him gave him ample authority. Besides, otherwise humans were essentially an unknown quantity. Discretion was the better part of valor.

The differences from moonside vessels made her tour interesting, though the cargo of salt ichthyoid smelled like a sewage processor in Okuma. Meanwhile, Holden’s craft disappeared out the gate.

The ship lay to at the dock. Two sailors brought her ashore in a dinghy. Well, not quite. Twin outriggers sta-bilized it against waves that traveled faster and struck harder than on Earth. Ihrdizu were ill-suited to rowing; one took the helm, the other walked a treadmill that drove small paddlewheels.

The climb to the heights was long, stiff, wet below and hot above. She reached the house very ready to put her feet up near a cup of coffee with a shot of whiskey in it. Later she’d find her things among the shipment boxes. Bringing them into the living quarters would require several tedious depressurizations in the lock.

To take off her, mask and breathe cool, odorless, Earth-type air was like a benediction. She spent a minute savoring it before she rummaged about. While the coffee brewed she investigated further.

Snooping? No, she’d be here a while, she needed to scout the territory.

Nothing private came to light. The main , room in-cluded the kitchenette. Behind it were a lesser chamber with a double bed, a bath cubicle that promised her a shower, and a laboratory equipped for basic biological, chemical, and geological work. She could spread her pad and sleeping bag there.

Holden wouldn’t likely offer her the bed.. She’d decline if he did. His wife had shared it, and a crib must once have stood close by.

Should he make a pass, he’d be sorry. Byrne held a black belt. She felt certain he had no such intention. If nothing else, he’d never willingly reveal that much vulner-ability to her.

She reentered the main room. It was as impersonal as a cell. Whatever decoration his wife put in, he had re-moved. Maybe he didn’t care to watch it gather dust and decay, year by year. His desk stood equally devoid of everything nonfunctional. Audiovisuals of people and past scenes must be in his database, along with recreational reading, shows, music, and, to be sure, his references and files. Yielding to an impulse, she keyed the computer. It required a password. She suspected it was programmed to wipe its entire contents in case of any other entry mode.

She lingered at the phone. How about calling HQ? No.

They knew she’d arrived safely, and she had no hard in-formation for them. When might she? When Holden gave her some cooperation, damn it. Couldn’t he see how he damaged his cause? He was no fool. Could they be right and he actually cracked?

The reason he gave for not taking her along to sea was ... paranoid. He had no cause to suppose her incapable of discretion, tact—assuming he knew what the words meant! If somehow she did jeopardize his mission, he was the cap-tain, he could order her below and she was legally bound to obey. Instead, he left her on that ship, after getting some news from its crew and laying silence about it on them.

Byrne frowned. The fortified coffee comforted her mouth and cleared weariness from her mind. Let her think.

She’d taken him more or less unawares. That he car-ried on’as planned, on this special day for his himatids, was understandable. But did the invitation to accompany Solo-mon out catch him quite by surprise? Hardly. Again and again and again, his reports had dwelt on the difficulty of communication. He believed the whole basis of language—not the kind of signals, but their semantics, their structure—was unlike the human, the Ihrdizuan, or, probably, the Chujoan. That was plausible, as alien as the himatids were. In fact, it was grounds for closing down the project. If he couldn’t really talk after all this time, if he couldn’t even prove the creatures were fully intelligent, then hadn’t he gone past the point of diminishing returns?

A sideline question. Byrne hauled her attention back to the main issue. Supposing that Holden was not merely reading into their behavior what he wanted to find and that the himatids did possess minds, then they could not sud-denly have sprung their proposal on him. He must have angled a long while for something of the kind, they striving to grasp what it was he meant, Probably there was never any breakthrough of comprehension. This simply became the day when the plan was finally agreed on.

What was in it for the calves? Could the original re-quest have been theirs? They might see an opportunity to learn something about those beings whom they only knew were their elders and parents—like Christians given a chance to send a living emissary to the afterworld—

What if he came back and told them the ancient Ro-mans had been right and the departed were feeble-minded shades? What if the carpet whales lost sapience? Another sideline question.

It still didn’t make sense that Holden dismissed Byrne. She would in fact have been a genuine, perhaps vital help, as crew, assistant, independent observer. Did he want to hog the entire credit? No, that was crazy; everybody would know how subordinate her role had been, and he could well hope for a glowing encomium from her. Was he crazier yet, unable to see plain logic? In either case, he had no business out there.

Or perhaps

Byrne snatched a breath. A spurt of coffee flew along. She dropped the cup in her lap, choked, sputtered, dabbled futilely at the mess.

Somehow that became a sign unto her. Nobody is per-fectly competent, completely sane. We need s

to watch over each other. She had the capability; therefore, she had the duty.

Hours had passed. Holden had traveled far. Neverthe-less, Byrne went through the drill step by conscious step. The least failure of preparation might kill her, or more than her.

When she went forth, Murasaki burned close to noon-day height. Windless heat baked acrid odors from the soil. Leaves on shrubs and low trees hung as if cut from brass. Few clouds remained overhead, but in the west, above the ocean, they raised a darkling rampart where lightning flick-ered and, faintly across distance, thunder mumbled. Near the thorp, half a dozen Ihrdizu stared her way. She knew by their stance how uneasy they were. Well, she too. She crawled into her aircraft, sealed it, depressurized the cabin, slipped her mask off, strapped in. Her fingers roved the controls. Engines droned. She lifted.

Gain altitude. If nothing untoward was going on, she didn’t wish to disturb Holden’s subjects, his work. Get in-visibly high.

The bay dwindled to a mercury pool between golden and dun contours. Outside it stretched arrays of rock and white chaos, a dangerous passage for a man to dare. Be-yond, the planet curved vastly westward, sea gleaming wrinkled, until the storm front raised its wall. Byrne saw it white above, blue-black and flameful below.

Close by—yes! Byrne set the robot to fly slowly in a circle and activated her main viewscreen.

Magnified, the scene leaped at her.

A score of carpet whales swam within a reach of sev-eral square kilometers. The titanic black forms—the largest easily a hundred meters long, twenty-five broad—flowed on the waves; she saw how each billowed up and back down, in different sectors, as the surges passed beneath. Windblown scud hazed the sight, but she also made out their own long undulations, which drove them ever north-ward.

The pace was as slow, a few knots. It never slack-ened, though, it went on and on, it would march like the tides or the days and nights or a Bach fugue until the giants were home in their waters around the pole. Abrupt tears stung her eyes. She had seen visuals, but here she met the elemental reality.

And Holden was down there amidst it. She thought that now she might begin to comprehend him.

Holden. Where was he? She reduced magnification, broadening the field. Yonder? She redirected the instrument and magnified afresh. “No!” ripped out of her.

Blood made a spreading inkblot across the gray, green, white stampede that was the sea. A whale writhed to and fro at the middle. In her mind she heard wind-hoot, wave-rush, the crash when that body heaved and fell back. Through the cold she tasted salt and blood in spindrift, smelled agony in the air. A ship lay by. Its sails were furled except for a jib and a main reefed to the last point Masts swayed wildly.

They slammed to a halt at one end of their arc, as the harpoon lines binding hull to prey drew taut.

Humans would be mad to make thus fast in such weather. Ihrdizu could swim ashore, come worse to worst. Holden had called the Gash folk bold sailors.

Holden, Holden. She turned the dials in frantic search.

A second ship appeared. Its mainmast floated in a tangle of rigging, to batter at planks already chewed. Flames licked over the deck, smoke blew off in rags. The ship listed ever more heavily to starboard. The sea must be pour-ing in through some hole such as a launched high-explosive grenade would blast.

Holden’s cruiser roiled water; bound for the first whaler she had seen. It was tiny in the viewfield, a horrible toy. Stop it, stop it.

Byrne drew breath after breath. She willed steadiness. Slow the, pulse, cool the heart, sharpen the eyes, quicken the brain. After a minute she took over control and dived.

No use radioing. He was on deck, the murderous lu-natic, at the wheel, at his guns. Put the fear of the Lord into him. Her engines drummed, louder than the nearing thunders. Ocean swelled till she could have counted every maned crest and cavernous trough.

The screen had locked onto the cruiser. Beneath her Holden turned into a human figure. And there came an Ihr-dizu. He (?) must have jumped from the doomed ship while Holden lay close and fired on it.

Behind him swam two more. Their tentacles held knife, ax, boat hook—weapons. Oh, the brave idiots!

The leader intercepted the boat. As it rolled to port, he reached up a forepaw, caught the rail, started to pull himself aboard.

Holden saw. He drew his pistol and shot. The Ihrdizu fell back into the sea. Holden left the others in his wake.

The aircraft raged toward him. He looked aloft. Byrne stabbed touch pads. Sight dimmed when acceleration dragged blood downward. A hundred meters high, the flyer swung back heavenward.

Panting; she leveled off at one klick, circled about, and peered. He was still clear in the screen. His left hand gripped the wheel. He raised his right fist and shook it.

“You son of a bitch!” she screamed uselessly into the transmitter. “Get away! Return! Next time my jets will make a cinder of you!”

He, increased power. The launch skimmed over wave tops, tore through their masses, onward. A

‘

fountain spouted at either bow.

Vomit rose bitter in Byrne’s gullet. She swallowed it but could not altogether quell tears. Her threat was not only unheard, it was empty. Safe herself, she couldn’t loose her sole weapon, because it was lethal. She’d go on trial for manslaughter at least Not that her hands would obey, did she command them to attack. And Holden knew it. Did he laugh aloud, into the oncoming storm?

“All right,” she gulped. “For your information, sir, in case you’ve forgotten, the law makes killing of any sa-pient, human or nonhuman, the same. It’s got to, or we’d soon be hated and overwhelmed. We have no jurisdiction over what aliens do to each other, but we have over our own kind. You’ve committed murder, Holden.”

A faint hope fluttered. She kept her altitude and cir-cled, waiting. Back and forth she swept the viewfield.

The cruiser lanced toward the first ship. Byrne found its deck and magnified. “Thanks, thanks,” she gasped. She must, though there be nobody to say it to. That crew was casting loose from the whale. A second jib and the mizzen were going up.

Clouds had boiled eastward across the sky. Rain ca-taracted from them. Byrne tossed about in blind, lightning-riven gray. Hailstones banged on metal.

When the squall had passed, the main storm hulked very near. Byrne saw the Gasher ship close-hauled, beating north. Holden trailed at a distance. So he didn’t intend to sink it. He’d just make

,

sure it went home, bearing its story. His fanaticism recognized some limit. But how many sail-ors from the foundered vessel would reach land alive?

Byrne focused on the wounded whale. Two of its fel-lows had swum to its side. She wondered what passed around the herd—those sounds traveled tens of kilome-ters—and what it meant. Pledge of help?

Consolation for the dying? She didn’t know whether the creature was mor-tally hurt or not. Nor did she know whether the clicks and thrums and boomings were aught but animal noises. Sil-verbucks, fenrises, skyrangers, and more rallied to their dis-tressed kindred. Documentaries from Earth told of apes, wolves, dolphins, and their big cousins, Instinct. Some con-sciousness, too, yes, but dim, unreasoning.

“I hope you survive,” she whispered.

The storm was almost upon her. She must either run from it or rise above it; else it might break her wings and dash her into the sea. A well-found watercraft could better ride it out. Nevertheless, Holden was crazy reckless to keep dogging the ship.

Maybe best would be if he sank. Byrne winced. She brought her aircraft about and fled east.

Land. Make the vehicle secure. Genjian winds were usually slow, but density gave monstrous momentum. Get inside.

While the weather brawled around, she paced, lashed by her thoughts. What to tell them at Okuma?

A police squad couldn’t arrive till well after Holden had probably returned here. Of course, she could leave before then.

She wouldn’t. She’d come to do a job. Too much was unexplained, unfinished. Holden should keep sense enough not to menace her, unless he had turned into a homicidal maniac. If he had, she expected she could cope.

In any event, the information needn’t perish with her. She didn’t want to divulge it, not yet. That would take matters out of her hands. The authorities themselves would have little choice. There were depths and subtleties here, and maybe a hermit’s stubborn pride to placate. There were issues larger than one man’s fate, or one woman’s. She needed to explore them.

In the end, she made a satellite relay call to Carlos Villareal. He was out; she got his machine, which was a disappointment. Some talk, private jokes, pet names would have been welcome in this wanly lit, chilly room where walls trembled under the wind. However, she would have concluded regardless by logging an encrypted message, putting him on his honor not to decode for fifty hours and to wipe it if she called back sooner.

‘thereafter it was a matter of waiting. She helped her-self from the cupboards and cooked a meal.

Holden ate adequately but dully. She napped. When the storm had passed, she went out, brought her things from the store-rooms, and arranged them in the house. She had another meal. She resumed her mask and strolled to the thorp, where she talked with the natives, bit by bit mastering their dialect.

Either they shied from saying much about Holden or they didn’t know much, after these many years.

His concern was with the himatids, they said. A himatid could catch tasty ichthyoids, reap useful sea vines, search for glow-pearls, if you gave it a knife or something like that; but it was stupid. Making clear to it what you wanted was hard work, and possible only for simple tasks. No wonder the forebears had quit catching and training them. Why he cared, well, who knew what goes on in the bellies of you io-hyumanai? Yes, he often ranted against the Gashers. Might he want the carpet whales to multiply freely for eventual harvesting by his own kind? No? Well, doubtless you fathom him. We are content to give him help now and then in exchange for rotproof cloth, rustproof steel, such things ... That was as far as Byrne got before exhaustion overwhelmed her.

She slept. She made breakfast. She prowled. Murasaki stood about twenty degrees above the western ocean when Holden returned.

She glimpsed his cruiser through a port. Externally, her preparations were scarcely more than securing her pistol to her hip before she masked and went out. Most were within herself.

The tide was flowing, the bay rising. It glared steely beneath a cloudless slate-colored sky. Shadows were long in the yellow of the hills, bringing forth their folded and scarred intricacy. Air steamed. As if they sensed something amiss, the Rockridgers had withdrawn from sight. Byrne stood on the path where the hillside bent sharply down-ward, so he would see her from afar. She kept her hands clear of her weapon. As he trudged upward, she saw he wasn’t armed.

He reached her and stopped. The features inside the helmet were hueless, sunken, a mesh of lines and creases; his eyes laired in dark hollows. Shoulders slumped. His coverall hung stiff with salt.

Pity smote. “Come inside,” she said gently. “I’ve got a pot of coffee on. Or there’s your whiskey, and I can rustle some food if you like.”

He nodded. She stepped aside. A slight, crawling cau-tion told her to let him go first.

They cycled through and removed their headgear. “Sit down,– she proposed. He sagged onto a threadbare lounger. She poured the coffee and set it on a table beside him, adding the bottle and a shot glass. He picked up the mug and sipped noisily. She smelled the old sweat on him.

Standing in front, she asked, “Would you rather sleep first?”

“Oh, no.” The gray head lifted. A bit of life entered the words.”1 let the cruiser take me back while I bunked down. We should settle what’s between us right away.”

“As you wish. I’ve entered a report, but under seal unless I don’t call in again. Talk as freely as you want. Be warned, though, I’ll decide what I pass on to headquarters.”

He nodded. “Fair enough. You’re honest.” Stillness, until: “And maybe you aren’t the officious bungler I sup-posed. To me, headquarters is mostly complaints, demands, and begrudging me my necessities.”

“Your isolation has cost you your perspective. We have two planets to think about. Three, if you count Earth.”

“Therefore you wonder whether my work is still worth supporting.” He sighed. “I would need long to ex-plain why. Quite likely I can’t. I’m not a poet.”

“What you shall have to show,” she told him. is that your work, is important enough to justify murder.”

His visage went empty. For a moment he seemed help-less. Resolution welled into him. His voice stayed low, but the tone strengthened. “No, you saw me preventing mur-der. Doesn’t the law permit that?

Memory whetted her reply. “I saw you’d started a ship to the bottom. I saw you shoot a crewbeing who tried to climb aboard your boat.”

“Self-defense. They would have killed me.”

“For cause,” she clipped. “What about Ihrdizu that didn’t live’ through the storm and the surf, to get ashore?”

“They brought it on themselves. You must have seen. They were out to slaughter sapient’ creatures.–

“Indeed? They surely didn’t think so. What proof have you?”

A fist knotted on his thigh. Blue veins bulged among white hairs. “Were you an intelligent being as a child,” he grated, “and are you a dumb animal now?”

–The calves are... controversial.”

“Because of the language problem. Entirely because of it. Civilized humans on Earth, in the age of discovery, they found other humans who were in the Stone Age, but they could soon talk together. Look at the himatid tools. Think how in the water they can’t have fire, houses—Think how remarkable it is they make as much as they do. If we could talk with them, there’d be no doubt.

“I can’t teach you what little I’ve learned of their lan-guage. You’d need years of the same experience. I myself, I haven’t gotten much further than the fact that it is a lan-guage, and this is something I know more in my guts than my brain, the way I know how to walk.

“Byrne, have you never read the linguists, the school of linguists who trace back to Chomslcy? Our ways of per-ceiving and describing the world are hard-wired into us. We were led astray by the accident that the croakers are wired pretty similarly. Maybe the Chupchups are, too; we don’t know yet. But the himatids certainly are not. That’s the barrier between them and us.”

He was harmless now, save perhaps to himself. Byrne felt the physical alertness unwind in her. A deeper tension took its place. She poured a shot, drew a chair opposite him, and sat down. The whiskey smoked warm across her tongue. Into the haggardness she said: “Maybe. As far as the calves are concerned. Did they want you to go halt the whaling? If so, how did they know about it?”

Startled, he took a moment to answer, slowly, “They may well not have. There was a ... a feeling that it’d be good if I accompanied Solomon out. More than that I can’t say. Give me another ten Earth years, and maybe I can.”

Keep him on the defensive. “Your motives for going. then?”

“Why, to see what Solomon did yonder, and the pod did, and take advantage of any opportunity that might come up.”

“But you already suspected Gashers were in the vi-cinity,” she flung at him. “You’d have caught word, a rumor, from the Rockridgers. In spite of your threats, you’d never taken action against whalers; they wouldn’t expect you to. That’s why you got rid of me. You thought you might do so. The ship you unloaded me on, its crew con-firmed the rumor.”

He stared at his feet. “True. I ... preferred no wit-nesses. All I meant to do was escort Solomon, keep it safe till it had joined its fellows, and... and possibly start mak-ing friends at last. But if ‘I had to fire a shot or two for that, well—

–You were ready to kill sapients—you did, it turned out—for the benefit of what?”

He looked up, almost bewildered. –Why, other sap-ients. I told you. The carpet whales.”

–Whose intelligence is even less proven than the calves’. If they’re smart, why don’t they protect themselves against the hunters?”

“I can’t say for sure. I can guess. Given their size, they aren’t able to go far below the surface.

Cross-currents would ripple them out of control, and pressure derange the whole thin body. Also, they can’t swim as fast as a ship can sail with a fair wind. And they’re naive. They’re gentle philosophers who haven’t realized the world is full of pred-ators. The calves know it is, but the adults forget. They have no natural enemies any more, and they have their con-templation to do.”

“Ha! I thought you despised mysticism.”

Holden bridled. “I didn’t call them mystics. I said the carpet whales spend their long, peaceful lives thinking. Compared to their’oldest and wisest, those Chupchups that everybody slavers over nowadays are morons or-Aargh!” His mouth contorted.

–So you believe,” Byrne said. “Can you prove it?”

The response was bleak as his dwelling. “Of course not. Can you prove to me that you have consciousness? It’s the hypothesis that best fits the facts. Give me a chance to learn more.”

“What about the hypothesis that the whales gradually lose whatever intelligence they may have had as calves?” There passed through the back of Byrne’s mind: An inter-esting moral question. How human is a brain-decayed Homo sapiens? What rights has he? Why shouldn’t an alert animal have the same?

The unkempt head shook. “Doesn’t make sense. The whales beget the young. How could the species stay sapient if there weren’t selection for sapience among the breeders? Nature puts no more pressure on them, as big as they are. The selection must be internal to the species, sexual, what-ever. The poets, musicians, storytellers, philosophers get the mates. Look, Australopithecus or Homo erectus. on Earth were already pretty successful. They had no serious natural enemies left. What do you suppose pushed their brains onward?”

She had seen the argument among his reports. She had never before heard it uttered. The force of it rang.

Yet—“You took the law into your own hands, on the basis of your pet theory,” Byrne said. “Whaling has gone on for centuries. You hated it, but this was the first time you actually did anything about it.

Why?” She raised a hand as lips parted in the beard. “Yes, you were escorting Solomon. The Gashers wouldn’t have come near you, would they? They must have known how you felt and what weapons you commanded. There was no threat to Solomon.”

“There was,” Holden declared. “My fuel was limited. I’d soon have to turn back, unless one or more of the whales stopped to ... have an exchange with me. That would not happen if the rest were being pursued.”

“Which they often were, when their migration took them by.” Byrne leaned forward. “The only difference this time was that you companioned a single calf, some-thing you might very well do again in the future when conditions were more favorable. How, then—since you have not proved the carpet whales, or even the calves, are sapient,”—have souls? gibed a childhood half-memory-“how do you justify attacking those poor sailors?”

He rose. His shadow fell huge between her and the light. The gray mane was a cloud around a half-seen face. “Joseph,” he said.

She must needs also rise. They stood confronted. “Joseph?”

“What I called it in its calfhood. A distinctive mark-ing on the back identifies it. Solomon led me straight there. Scent? Suddenly, here were two of them I knew. And Joseph remembered. It curled its front end over my deck and made the old music we’d worked out together. I had my opening, my foothold I’d always hoped for. But yonder came the Gasher ships and commenced their butchery.

“I had to stop it. Fuel wouldn’t let me follow the second ship far, but the crew wouldn’t know that. I lay out till the pod must be well past their fjord. With luck, the hunters will accept that this stretch of coast is interdicted to them; and Solomon and Joseph and I can meet again. Otherwise I’ll do whatever is necessary, as often as nec-essary, till the sanctuary is established. If your damned smug politicians and bureaucrats will allow.”

Byrne’s throat tightened until she could barely get out, “That, for the sake of research?”

“For the sake of humanity,” he growled.

She blinked. “What?”

A rusty clang of defiance: “Or philosophy, or the next stage of civilization, or whatever you choose to call it. Grandiose? Well, ask yourself what kind of megalo-maniac it would take to seriously claim our species is in no need of improvement. But for that we’ll have to un-derstand ourselves, and we never will till we can get out-side ourselves.

“What are we, besides animals? Our language. Sym-bols, arts, sciences, hopes, fears, everything that makes us human is in language. And it isn’t a set of arbitrary con-ventions. The basis of it is biological.

“Gliders theorem. Nothing can completely describe or account for itself. We can’t reason about the basis of language except in a metalanguage. For that, we’ve first got to compare at least one other language totally different from ours, different right down in the genes, and see what our own built-in premises are. Between us and the himatids—”

Holden’s fist struck the table. The sound went small through stillness. “Oh, hell,” he said. She heard how he could no longer fight off the weariness. “Let my advocate make the fine speeches in court.”

Seeking her eyes: “But could we spend a while together before then, you and me, while I try to show yott what I mean? Maybe you’ll put in a good word afterward. Maybe they’ll let me continue here. Or else somebody new.”

For a space she heard only, remotely, the wind and the sea. At last he muttered, “You look puzzled.

Well, I guess I didn’t make myself clear.”

Byrne shook herself. The chill that had gathered while he talked still stirred beneath her skin. It wasn’t from fear or shock or even pity. She had felt it before, a few times, when a bugle blew at sunset in memoriam, when under-standing of the cosmological equation opened up to her, when “No, I think I followed you,” she breathed. “And yes, I think I will argue for... for leniency. You did wrong today, but your cause is... tremendous.”

The dulled voice and drained countenance became ear-nest. “Do you really see, already?” he asked.

“You agree I couldn’t abandon it?”

The deaths came back to crowd the future out of her. “We can’t,” she corrected him. “We humans, that is. You were too impatient. We’ve got generations ahead of us to pursue this.”

“You won’t, unless I nail your attention fast to it,” he replied. “And I will, whatever the cost.”

She wondered how sane he in truth was. She wondered what sanity was.

He went to the computer on the desk. A big, knuckly hand worked its keyboard. Byrne saw just his back, like a stooping darkness. He accessed a visual. The woman had been plain, middle-aged, but she kept a young smile.

“This was her idea,” Holden said. “What she lived for.”

He switched off, turned around, and spoke curtly of practical matters.

Birthing Pool

by Nancy Kress

Mommy said they had been here too long.

How long was too long? The question didn’t make much sense to Rilla. She had been on Genji her whole life. Did that mean her life had been too long? She was not quite ten standard.

“Less than a year till we go home to Earth,” Mommy said, dumping mush from the food processor into a bowl and reaching for her precious spice safe. She said this often, as if she didn’t want Rilla to forget it.

“I am home,” Rilla said, but Mommy’s QED chimed softly and in a flash she had left the food machine and run to the console in the corner of the field dome, where new figures and pictures scrolled across the screen.

“I’m only the fourth human born on Genji,” Rilla said loudly, in case Mommy could be distracted from the QED. “Rita Byrne, Seigi Minoru, Cade Anson, and me.”

But all Mommy said was. “Call your father, Rilla! He’s down at the village! Tell him to come see this!”

Nobody listened to a ten-year-old. Nobody.

Still, it was all right to be sent down to the village. Tmafekitch might even be there. Rilla put on her suit, checked the tanks and translator and safety devices, cycled through the air lock, and started across the plateau toward the loose collection of Ihrdizu farms and pools and greens.

She found her father taking water samples from a birthing pool with two Ihrdizu grown-ups. Even Rilla knew that her father, or any other scientist on Genji, couldn’t possibly need any more water samples from any more birth-ing pools. For nearly thirty years teams had collected thousands of samples from pools in Nighland, Southland, even in Farland, on the other side of the world where it was always moonless and Rilla had never been. The QED had analyzed all the sample data and then analyzed it again and again, and not even Daddy could think there was any-thing left to learn from the algae growing in an empty birth-ing pool. No, Daddy just wanted a way to talk to the two Ihrdizu grown-ups, one of whom had only just arrived in the village and mated with Tshifel, an unmarried male, a little while ago. Daddy always liked to talk to females who had just finished their mating journey, especially if they had traveled a long way to find a mate.

Rilla sometimes considered that the only mate her age in the entire Murasaki System was Seigi Minoru. He was on Chujo with his parents. That would be a long mating journey.

“Rilla;” Daddy said. “What are you doing here?”

“Mommy says to come right away. There’s something interesting on the QED.”

It was hard to see Daddy’s expression through his hel-met, but it seemed to Rilla that he didn’t really want to leave. Why not? Nothing interesting could be going on here. But then Daddy said his good-byes—without the translator, as what he and Mommy called a gesture of cour-tesy, and Rilla couldn’t help noticing that his accent was terrible—and reached for her hand.

“Come on, Ril

But Rilla caught sight of Trnafekitch, coming around the corner of the Carnot temple. “I’ll stay here, Daddy. There’s Tmafekitchf’

“Be careful,– he said automatically, and hurried to-ward the dome.

“Tmafekitch!” Rilla yelled. Tmafekitch saw her and ambled over. “What were you doing?”

“Listening to the talker in the Carnot temple,” her friend said. She spoke a combination of English, Ihrdizu, and the private language she and Rilla had spoken to each other all Rilla’s life. All Tmafekitch’s, too. With Tmafek-itch, Rilla hardly used her translator at all.

“There was a talker in the temple and you didn’t come tell me?” Rilla said, outraged. “What story was she talking?”

“Szikwshawmi.”

“That’s the best one!’

In Ihrdizu, this came out “the best one to eat,” since stories for the Ihrdizu were listened to with devouring attention. Daddy had explained this to Rilla, and ordinarily she got the giggles every time she thought of stories coming out of Mommy’s food machine. But this time she was too disappointed. The story of Szikwshawmi was great, with angels appearing out of the sky to strike female Ihrdizu and give them greater strength to be warriors. Rilla and Tmafekitch had acted it out lots of times, changing parts so that each got to pounce out of the sky and each got to be given great strength and fierce-ness. And it was even better told inside the Camot temple, which a man named Robert Carnot had built for the Ihrdizu to be religious in a long time ago, because if the talker sat in the right place there were thrilling echoes.

“Come, do not die on the starside,” Tmafekitch said, which meant that Rilla was not supposed to be so negative. “I have something to tell you.”

“What?” Rilla said sulkily. “Look at that she over there—the new one—why is she watching us so hard?”

“She has never seen a human until she carne here.–

So that was why Daddy had been so eager to talk to the new female. She came from a village where no scien-tists had been. She must have had a very long mating jour-ney. Mommy and Daddy’s field camp, after all, wasn’t on Farland. It was only an hour’s fly from Okuma Base, where there were plenty of humans.

“I Tmafekitch said, and walked away, flipping her tail. Tmafekitch was angry; Rilla realized it was because she hadn’t asked what the something was that Tma-fekitch had offered to tell her—what Mommy would call “a serious breach of manners.”

“1 am low,” she said hastily to Tmafekitch’s retreat-ing back. “Cut off my tail. May I never rise to Chujo.”

Tnaafekitch turned around and nodded, accepting the apology. She never held a grudge. Unlike me, thought Rilla, who was currently holding several grudges against several people. But not against Tmafekitch. Never against Tmafekitch.

“I have something to tell you,” Tmafekitch said, just as if the little anger hadn’t happened.

“Oh, what?”

“Last dark I had a heat flush. The first.”

Rilla stared at the Ihrdizu. A heat flush! “But that means you won’t be a little-she any more! You’ll be a gniwn-up! And you’ll go off on a mating journey!”

“Yes. So,” Tmafekitch said.

“And leave me here!”

“You will soon go off on your own mating journey,” Tmafekitch said, but Rilla heard in her clicks and words and grunts and pitch—the grunts that she and Tmafekitch had invented together!—that Tmafekitch was sad about the part-ing, too. Well, so what! Sadness didn’t help! Tmafekitch would go off to find some male, and it would have to be pretty far off because look how far the new she;had had to come to find anybody to—mate with, and then Rilla would never see Tmafelcitch again. Never. And in less than a year Mommy and Daddy would take her back to Earth that they were so Chujo about, and Rilla would have nothing left. Nothing. Nothing.

She turned and left Tmafekitch standing there without even, a good-bye courtesy, running away from the village, away from the dome, her strong Genji-bred legs standing against the gravity better than her parents ever could, not even the bulky suit much slowing her flight under the thick, gray sky.

“Let me see it again,” Bruce Johnson said.

His wife Jane hit Replay, and the QED in the corner of the small dome, half research station and half home, started the incredible sequence of data again.

The QED—Quantum-Effect Device—was on receiv-ing mode, which meant that at the moment it was doing no thinking of its own but merely acting as a terminal to re-ceive data from the main computer at Okuma Base, atop Mount Korabachi. The QED in the field dome was capable of thinking, very smart thinking, due to fuzzy programs that could make reasonable deductions from incomplete evi-dence.

Bruce Johnson, xenobiologist, had thought often over the last ten years that this was a good thing because on Genji all you got was incomplete knowledge. This didn’t bother him. A huge ex-Texan who found it hard to sit still, either physically or mentally, he was pleased rather than not that Murasaki System still held so many facts that re-fused to fit together. It made for interesting theories. And now, looking at the data coming in on receiver mode, here was room for one more.

The carpet whales, those huge sluggish maybe-sentient himatids that spent their unguessably long lives in the polar waters of Genji’s starside, were all swimming toward moonside.

All of them.

They were doing it very, very slowly, at even less than the two knots that were characteristic of their budding jour-neys. Measurement of their speed and direction came from Malachiel Holden, the half-crazy hermit researcher who fa-natically studied the carpet whales from a research outpost on Farland. Well, not “hermit” any more, not since he had married Rita Byrne, the Genji-born girl young enough to be his daughter. That had fascinated and appalled Jane, who had taken to giving worried glances at Rilla and then dou-bled her insistence that Bruce and she and Rilla secure places on the ship arriving from and returning to Earth next year. Bruce didn’t much care that Rita Byrne had married Malachiel Holden. People didn’t interest him as much as Ihrdizu or himatids.

Except for Jane and Rilla, of course.

“Look at that,” he said to Jane. “All of those damn carpet whales. All moving toward moonside, where they never go.”

“‘Holden has done a beautiful job of tracking their movements. He must spend every minute of every day ei-ther at sea or running QED projections.”

“Not practical,” Bruce said. “But he’s good, all right. Cautious, though. This is all data and images—he’s not even offering a tentative hypothesis.”

“Just an expense request,” Jane said dryly. The al-location of resources to carpet-whale study had always been a sore point among the researchers of the Ihrdizu: the Ihr-clizu at least cooperated with being researched. In their own eccentric way. “He wants a station set up at the probable point of convergence of all the whales. As soon as he can ‘figure out what it is.”

“Well, of, course,” Bruce said. Jane glanced at her husband. Abruptly she moved into his line of sight, not directly between him and the screen but clearly in his pe-ripheral vision.

‘Truce—we’re leaving in, less than a year right? We are leaving?”

“Will you look at that,” he said softly. “Just look at that.”

At Olcuma Base, Jordan Dane, First Conciliator, stared at another set of data, this set from the moon.

“Are they sure of this?” he asked his scientific liaison, Suzy Tatsumi, a middle-aged woman of soft-spoken tact and penetrating intelligence.

“Yes, First Conciliator. They are sure.”

He glanced at her, half smiling. How did she get so many delicate shades of meaning into six words?

Verifi-cation (“The data is reliable”), rebuke (“They would not send it if they were not sure”), loyalty (“They on Chujo are my countrymen, after all, should you be questioning them to me?”), and conciliation CI know it is just a West-ern reflex, to question data integrity, to question even su-perior researchers”).

How did Tatsumi-san do it? She should be First Conciliator.

Which was a damn silly title anyway. It sounded as if he were followed by a whole line of other conciliators—second, third—like a tiered judiciary system. But there was only Dane, at thirty-five standard years one of the youngest adults on Genji, chosen by the seven different human groups in the Murasaki System to coordinate forums at which their differences could be conciliated. Six of those groups maintained clusters of headquarter domes at Okuma Base, where most days you could breathe most of the air: three domes for the Japanese expedition that had seniority on Genji. Three domes for the American scientists that had arrived twenty-five years ago. Four domes for the British-led multinational expedition five years after that. And three smaller domes belonging to smaller groups.

Among the domes, power packs hummed softly. Okuma Base had also, for the last six years, been the nexus of the information-sharing network Dane had set up. The QED in the British dome acted as a clearinghouse, not be-cause the British equipment was particularly distinguished but because the Japanese and the Southwest American teams both found it easier to deal with the British than with each other.

That was also probably the reason Jordan Dane had been elected First Conciliator. It was a vital job, he had come to see, even though it carried no actual power what-soever and he could not order anyone to do anything. But the post was nonetheless necessary. First, because the seven groups were so diverse—three English-speaking scientific expeditions; the large group of Japanese scientists; the pa-thetic remnants of the proselytizing Carnot missionaries, mostly wiped out by plague; one even weirder religious group called the Mission of Fruitful Life whose stated aim was to fill the entire galaxy with humans, however long it took; and one Spacer group who denied being colonists—there weren’t enough human-usable resources on Genji to self-support colonists—but didn’t seem to be anything else.

They were artists, they said, but they neither wrote nor painted nor performed. They described themselves as “time artists,” and from what Dane could see, they sat and con-templated time at someone’s incredible expense.

The second reason a First Conciliator was needed was the twenty-year-old massacre of Robert Carrot, human, and Aaron Kammer, God-knows-what, by Ihrdizu fisherfolk, who had in turn been massacring whales. The incident had left anger, confusion, and myths. The anger belonged to the Japanese, who had seen the two Anglo factions as disrupt-ing Genji culture to gain power and glory. The confusion belonged to. Edward Philby, the self-appointed first First Conciliator, who had witnessed (caused?) the massacre and who had never been the same afterward. The myths be-longed to the Ihrdizu. All sorts of myths, none of them particularly influential but all of them tenacious: that the temples Robert Camot left behind were blessed by angels from the sky. That the humans could disappear into the sea and become carpet whales. That Aaron Kammer was not really dead but had been glimpsed in Farland.

This last, oddly, was what had driven that super-rationalist Edward Philby around the bend.

The odd thing, though, was that Philby had not left Genji. Twenty years later and he was still here, sitting with the time artists, contemplating whatever it was that time artists contemplated.

Tatsumi never spoke of him. Jordan Dane never asked her why, sensing that she would not answer, that there were things moving below the surface of her mind about Philby. He could sense things like, that.

It was why he had lasted as First Conciliator. And Suzy Tatsumi was naturally reti-cent, formal. He liked that in her: it was restful. Perhaps it was also why she had lasted as liaison to diverse sets of scientists.

He said to her now, “Who is still here who remembers that first time the snug mats formed on Chujo?

Who was an eyewitness to the bioloons?” He was careful not to say the “so-called bioloons,” as the non-Japanese scientists did. In nearly thirty years, no one had ever seen bioloons form again.

Tatsumi said, “Most of them returned on the second Japanese ship. But there is here a woman, Miyuki Kaneko, who witnessed it all.”

“Here? On Genji?”

“No. On Chujo.”

Dane nodded. He stared a moment longer at the trans-mitter screen, which showed a valley floor on bleak Chujo writhing as if alive. Which it was, with the bioengineered microorganisms that, together, made a mysterious sort of cloth that had already done so many things on Murasaki’s worlds: Cure.

Transform. Kill.

“I think we should call a general forum,” Dane said. “Representatives from each group, two from those with teams on both Genji and Chujo. Transmitter linkup only for those who absolutely can’t spare the personnel from either the snug watch or the carpet-whale watch. Everyone else welcome, to the dome’s capacity. Call it a priority-two meeting: information sharing with possible vote on signif-icant action.”

Tatsumi nodded. She didn’t look surprised. “For when shall I call the meeting, First Conciliator?”

Dane stared at, the snug writhing over the floor of Chujo. The screen switched to data on the nomadic Chup-chups, traveling toward the spot. even as the carpet whales traveled toward... something or other.

“For now,” he said. “Better yet, for yesterday.”

Jane Johnson stood at the edge of the plateau that held the Johnson field dome and the Ihrdizu village, and bitterly watched the water below rising up the plateau wall.

Water on Genji was always doing some damn thing: rising in tides, falling, in tides, whipping into vicious sea storms, stagnating in birth pools until the smell was enough to drive you crazy, even, according to the best research theory, wiping out entire ecosystems on a systematic basis, like endless punishments of an entire race for some sin no one remembered.

She had been so enthusiastic about ecosystem research during her first year on Genji. Everything had seemed so exciting, after the confinement of the ship. She was a bot-anist; there had been so many new plants. New people. New possibilities. Genji had struck her as ugly, but next to the rest of it, that had hardly mattered.

How did you account for a ten-year mistake?

It had started with her pregnancy, an astonishment that had resulted from a batch of defective pregnancy blockers among the supplies. Well, with that many pharmaceuticals aboard that long, there were bound to be some defects. The surprising thing had been her fight against an abortion; She had wanted the baby fiercely, unthinkingly, and eventually Bruce had given up arguing. It wasn’t as if she had been the first: Rita Byrne was already fifteen years old and thriv-ing. On Chujo, little Seigi Minoru was almost two.

She didn’t know how it had been for those mothers, but for Jane, Rilla’s birth had changed everything. With her baby in her arms Jane had come to look at Genji as the hell it really was. Thick, heavy planet, dragging on her body, on her legs, on her very arms as she held her baby. Thick, soupy gray air, pressing down on them wherever they went, not even safe to breathe. Ultraviolet radiation to sear an infant’s unprotected skin, swooping pseudobirds strong enough in their perverse gravity to carry away an Ihrdizu child. Or a human one.

Rilla changed everythingg. Under the huge dome at Okuma Base while Bruce went into the field to work, or in the research camps he insisted she bring Rilla to when the little girl was older, Rilla was a constant presence in Jane’s heart, pressing on her, weighing on her. Rilla deserved bet-ter. Rilla deserved a planet where she could run outside unfettered in the sunlight, dive into clear blue water, play with little girls instead of the little-she’s of the friendly Ihrdizu, who no matter how friendly could never really be friends. That was the first lesson of xenobiology: The alien is not human. Not your own behaviors, not your own mo-tivations, not your own kind.

No woman should ever have a baby off-planet.

The tide below the plateau had almost peaked. Jane looked at the swirling water beneath her. Then she closed her eyes and arched her back slightly, not easy to’ do in her bulky suit. But she wasn’t in her suit. She stood on the edge of a red cliff at Amilcar, and below her the Mediter-ranean crashed, blue as the sky. Her back was arched against the wind, which blew her hair back from her face and brought to her the scent of wild jasmine. She sniffed deeply, eyes closed, only opening them because she was so hungry for the exquisite sight of the dusty leaves of olive trees lacy against the bright, clear sky.

“I’m not going!” Rilla cried, aghast. “How can you make me go?”

Her father looked at her, not especially patiently. Be-hind them, Mommy was doing something to the QED, and Rilla knew why, too: so that Mommy wouldn’t have to look at Rilla while Daddy told her she had to go with them to the conference at Okuma Base. If Mommy had said she had to go, Rilla could always have run to Daddy; Daddy liked her to be such friends with Tmafekitch. But Daddy was the one telling her. There was no escape.

“I won’t go! run away with Tmafekitch on her mating journey!”

Mommy turned around sharply, her face white. But Daddy only said, in a tone he probably thought was sooth-ing, “Now, Rilla, you know you can’t do that. How could you get food, or air tanks? And besides, Tmafekitch wouldn’t take you. She has an important job to do, finding a mate so she can establish a homestead and not be a little-she anymore. She can’t fit you into that job.”

This was true. Rilla had already asked Tmafekitch. And Tmafeldtch, waving, her snorkel and clicking her feet in a way that meant she was embarrassed, had said no. The flush was all over her skin, that hateful sex flush that meant soon Rilla would never see her friend again.

“But by the time we get back from Okuma Base, Tmafekitch might be already gone!”

“She might not,” Daddy said. But he didn’t look at her when he said it.

Rilla burst into tears, stamped both her feet, and fled behind her partition.

Jane frowned. “When did she start doing that?”

“Doing what?” Bruce said. He still squatted on the floor, bringing himself down to Rilla’s height. His love for his daughter, he often thought, should not be such a painful thing.

“Stamping both her feet like that to show she’s angry. In that Ihrdizu pattern.”

“I don’t know.”

“She never smiles,” Jane said.

“Smiles are rude in Ihrdizu. You know that. The tongue is a sex organ.”

“She’s not Ihrdizu!”

Bruce rose. “Lay off, Jane, will you?”

“She’s not Ihrdizu.”

Within an hour the three of them were in the flyer, bound for Olcuma Base.

Dane looked around the crowded room. Nobody looked back; they were all watching the monitor showing carpet whales migrating on Genji, snug mats growing on Chujo, or both.

The scientists sat in rows on inflatable benches, rea-sonably orderly even under stress. Hauro Maguto repre-sented the Japanese scientists on Genji, Miyuki Kaneko those on Chujo. Miyuki had answered eager questions al-most the moment her shuttle had landed, but she hadn’t been able to add much. The data coming in on transmission was fresher than her last firsthand information from Chujo. She claimed, Dane remembered, to be an eyewitness to the bioloons these snug mats had supposedly become twenty-eight years ago. Her face, as she stared at the visuals from the Chujo upland valleys, showed nothing.

Six designated representatives from the three other sci-entific expeditions also occupied inflatable benches, talking quietly among themselves. Other people crowded in the back, among them, Dane saw, the Johnsons. He had re-ceived three requests for berth space aboard the Light of Allah, due to arrive and depart Genji in eight months, from Jane Johnson. None had been cotransmitted with her hus-band. A bad sign. The child, Rilla, was not at the meeting; Jane had probably left her to play with the only other child on Genji, six-year-old Cade Anson.

Between the inflatable benches and the standing sci-entists sat two members of the Quantists: two of the nine-teen that existed, including Cade Anson. Dane couldn’t remember their names. They were muttering something. Prayers?

Well away from the Quantists, a woman from the Mis-sion of Fruitful Life sat on a folding stool. She was obvi-ously pregnant. “Go forth and multiply” meant, to the Fruity Livers, just that; they were fulfilling their mission to fill the whole galaxy with humanity, starting with Genji. What was with these people, to send a pregnant woman to do anything in this gravity? But the woman herself looked calm enough, if very uncomfortable.

No one at all had come from the small weird collective of the time artists.

“I think we should get started,” Dane said genially. Faces turned toward him, first reluctantly and then with determination.

“We’ve all looked at the data and the images,” Dane said. “I’d like to organize the meeting in three parts, if that’s all right with you all.” He smiled. Conciliatorily. “First, I’d like a brief summary of all the questions raised by each group by the events of the last few days. Second, I’d like to ask for possible interpretations of those events or answers to those questions, by way of sharing specula-tion and information. Finally, we’ll determine together what needs to be done. If anything.”

People nodded. Before Dane could speak again, one of the Quantists spoke. “Why isn’t there an Ihrdizu at this meeting?”

Dane said, “Well, I ... it didn’t seem appropriate. We’re sharing human perspectives, and we have researchers with us well qualified to share Ihrdizu ideas—”

“Not the ideas of those Ihrdizu who already believe in the Ascendancy!”

“Sit down!” someone else called. “It’s not your turn!”

“You can speak for your culture-contaminated tame Ihrdizu,” someone else said, with contempt.

Dane saw the nonconfrontational Japanese wince,

Dane said, “How many people vote to invite an Ihr-dizu representative to this meeting?” Only the Quantists raised their hands. “All right, let’s start with the questions we don’t know answers to. Dr.

Kaneko?”

Miyuki Kaneko rose heavily. Twenty years on Chujo’s lighter gravity, Dane thought. He could picture her younger, more lithe, although her present appearance—small, serene, not yet old when the average life span stretched to nearly a century—pleased him as well. Nor had he overestimated her capacity for organized thought.

She said, “One: We do not know what has triggered the snug mats to start re-forming in Chujo’s highland val-leys, after they have not done so for twenty-eight years. Two: We do not know whether this snug-mat formation is larger than the ones twenty-five years ago, because then no measurements were made. Three: We do not know what is in the ‘books’ in the library cairns, since for twenty-eight years the Chupchups have not let us examine a single one. Four. We, still do not know why the Chupchups abandoned their elaborate and technologically advanced cities to live as nomads, or when, or why they seem to have no interest in the cities now. Nor in the bioengineering that, to judge from what they did to Aaron Kammer, they once knew how to perform.”

There was a moment of silence; to those newer to Genji or Chujo, Aaron Kammer’s weird history was almost as unsubstantiated as the bioloons.

A Quantist said derisively, “You sure haven’t learned much in, nearly thirty years on the moon!”

Dane said swiftly, “That is not a useful comment. Please remember that this meeting is being held on Lorentz Expedition property and that anyone who disrupts it can be evicted.”

Miyuki said, just as if the comment had been a rea-soned and constructive criticism, “It is difficult to study a people who will not acknowledge your existence, yes. We have been much distressed.”

Dane looked at, her admiringly. She, too, might have been a First Conciliator.

“Five,” Miyuki said, and now her voice did change, taking on a slight hesitation. “We still do not know if the carvings in the abandoned cities have any meaning. Or ever did have.”

Dane said, “Describe one for us, just to fill in those people who have not been to Chujo.” This covered much of the room.

Miyuki said, in that same hesitant voice—the carving had some personal meaning for her, Dane guessed, that she herself was having difficulty defining—“There is one of a tigerlike creature whose tail curves around and around, forming a Chupchup face, before it comes into the mouth of the tiger to be consumed. In the background are bio-loons. This is how we know the bioloon phenomenon did not happen for the first time twenty-eight years ago.”

Abruptly, she sat down. Dane said, “Next?”

Kara Linden stood, a brisk, no-nonsense woman who was chief of the Lorentz Expedition. “There are fewer things we don’t know about the Ihrdizu than about the Chu-joans, of course, because the Ihrdizu are so cooperative. But they are also factual, practical, and much more hard-wired to their basic biological patterns than are humans. This means they don’t question their own lives very deeply, and even their ‘religions,’ if I can use that word, are usually taken very casually. Religion seems to be mostly valued as a source of enjoyable stories and festivals than anything else, and even the Carnot temples”—she glanced contemp-tuously at the Quantists—currently are mostly used as community recreation huts, with amiable religious frosting. Given all this, the main thing we don’t know about the Ihrdizu is why they continue to regard Chujo with some reverence—as much reverence, I may add, as such a prac-tical and no-nonsense people seem capable of.”

Dane hid a grin; it was obvious Dr. Linden approved of this trait in the Ihrdizu. She might have made a good Ihrdizu herself.

She finished with, “The Ihrdizu say the Masters live on Chujo, but they are unable to define what these ‘masters’ are masters of They say they will go to Chujo one day, but questioning them about whether this means they will go there after death produces only bewilderment. They have no afterlife myth. We have offered repeatedly to take a few of them to Chujo in the shuttle, but they always decline, with what seems a total lack of not only interest but com-prehension. They are not stupid, but on the subject of Chujo they are... are opaque, and I have come to the conclusion that they are opaque to themselves as well. The most you can get out of an Ihrdizu, even a highly intelligent Ihrdizu in a technological capacity in one of the largest villages, is ‘Oh, Chujo ... The Masters are there. In time, we will go, too.’ Then they change the subject.”

“All right,” Dane said, “the list of things we don’t know is growing nicely.” A few people laughed.

“Who will speak to the carpet-whale migration?”

After a moment a young man stood, younger even than Dane. “I can’t really say ... I mean, Dr.

Holden and his wife report to me, but not on a regular basis.—The young man blushed. Dane guessed that Dr. Holden reported to this timid person only because no one else would take the job of supervising the irascible and caustic researcher.

“But, anyway,” the young man ventured, “what we don’t know about the carpet whales is why they’re suddenly migrating to moonside, where exactly they’re going, when they’ll get there, what triggered the migration, or what they’ll do when they arrive.”

That about covered it, Dane thought. “Now, does all our ignorance constitute a crisis of any sort?

Several people have talked to me’’—besieged me, he wanted to say but didn’t—“about the reallocation of research territories, given that current events have made some areas suddenly much more desirable.”

Everybody wanted to be near where the action was, even if nobody knew what the action meant. “Now, we had all agreed—voluntarily— to spread out far enough not to contaminate each others’ sphere of culture.” This was not strictly true; the Quantists went around con-taminating everywhere they could, but nineteen people with limited resources couldn’t influence very much. If the Ihr-dizu had taken up Robert Carnot’s Church of the Ascen-dancy, that might have been a different thing, but as Kara Linden pointed out, for the most part they had not.

Dane drew a deep breath: Here goes. “So the question before us is whether or not we want to reallocate research spheres, on what basis, and to whom, given the difference in each party’s equipment and interests.”

Immediately a dozen voices clamored for the floor. Several people rose to their feet, with varying degrees of clumsiness. No one could be heard. Dane simply waited: if he recognized no one, eventually they would quiet down and restore order. Unless, of course, there was a fistfight, and he didn’t think the scientists would do that. The Quan-tists might—twenty years of frustration, starting with plague and massacre, was not exactly calming—but the sci-entists, eager to claim research rights, ignored the religious groups. The Fruity Livers, as usual, simply sat, multiplying.

Bruce Johnson yelled, “Ihrdizu genetic patterns... “

Somebody else called, ‘‘—informally agreed that after fifteen months ... “

“—carpet whales—”

“—Chujo—”

The door at the back of the room slammed open.

Everybody turned. A woman strode in, brisk even in the heavy gravity, carrying a holocorder. Dane had never seen her before. Then,—with a shock, he realized that he had: a year ago, at her wedding. Rita Byrne Holden. Her skin was burnt and mottled—the ultraviolet radiation she must be permitting herself to take in the name of open-sea research! Born on Genji, she had always had a squat, com-pact body heavily muscled, as human anatomy shaped itself to Genji gravitational imperatives. Now, however, her mus-cles in the brief indoor tunic—she and Holden must live nearly naked, when they were not in suits—bulged like a caricature of a sumo wrestler, although without the fat. She was impressive but oddly deformed. Dane would not want to have to tangle with her in a fair fight.

Jane Johnson looked at her with something very like terror.

“Listen,” Rita said, without ritual pleasantries, “I’ve got something to show you. Holden sent me because he wanted to be sure you all saw this without any screwups or evasions.”

The rabbity young man whom Holden was supposed to “report to” opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Rita plugged the holocorder into the QED, blanked the pictures on the two-dimensional screen, and turned the de-vice on. For a moment Dane wondered how Holden. the fringe researcher, had wangled a rare and expensive holocorder, but then he forgot that, and everything else, in the three-dimensional hologram that sprang to life in the four-foot square of alloy floor in front of the QED.

Carpet whales. Twelve, sixteen, twenty of them, al-ready arrived at the strait between Nighland and Southland, their dark hugeness reduced to absurd miniaturization by the holo. But not so miniature that he could not see that one whale had rolled over. Its ventral side, grayish white, was exposed to the sky.

Above it, clearly shimmering in ribbons of red and green light, floated an enormous repre-sentation of a twisted human figure covered in snug that could only be Aaron Kammer.

Rilla looked out the window of the flyer as it skimmed over the surface of Genji toward their dome.

Hurry, hurry! Oh, what if Tmafekitch had already left on her mating jour-ney and Rilla never even got to say good-bye? Daddy had promised they would get back before Tmafekitch left, but then the stupid meeting had gone hours and hours past what it was supposed to, all because of Rita Byrne. People shout-ing, arguing, talking, just sitting there. A whole day, almost, and all the while Tmafekitch may be setting out to look for a stupid mate and leave Rilla behind forever.

And her parents were still at it, talking even while Rilla’s throat hurt so much it might just break.

“Not light,” Daddy said, for the hundredth time. “Ex-udates, gases and water, reflected and refracted through thousands of precisely placed bits of shiny minerals embed-ded in the flesh and acting as mirrors.

All to produce a sort of hobo of Aaron Kammer. Of Aaron Kammer! It’s not possible.”

“We saw it,” Mommy said. She sounded scared. “It was photographable. Not a drug-induced illusion or hypnosis.”

“No wonder Rita Byrne brought the pictures herself. No one would have believed her.”

“A lot still didn’t.”

“Not even the QED could specify an exact moving arrangement of mineral embedding and exudate control to produce an illusion like that,” Daddy said. “Well, all right, maybe the QED could, but ... it’s not possible. It doesn’t make sense. How could it happen?” Unlike Mommy, Daddy didn’t look scared.

His eyes were bright, and his big rough hands moved restlessly over the flyer controls.

Mommy didn’t answer. Rilla leaned forward, to get there sooner, or make the flyer go faster, or something. Hurry! Hurry!

“It’s not possible,” Daddy said.

“Will you stop saying that?” Mommy said sharply. “Obviously it is possible. The himatids did it.

Genetic en-gineering, all that time they’ve been growing out there, multiplying, reaching some kind of critical mass to do whatever it is they do out there for millennia... it’s obvi-ously possible, because it exists!”

“Don’t shout, Jane.”

“I’ll shout if I want to!”

Daddy said, “You used to be a researcher. Intellectual questions used to engage you.”

“I used to be a lot of things,” Mommy said, and turned her back to watch their dome approach portside.

Rilla sealed her helmet. The moment she was out of the flyer, she was running, ignoring Mommy screaming be-hind her. “Rilla! You didn’t check your tanks or your safety devices!” Ignoring Daddy, who started to run after her, then stopped. He couldn’t catch her. Not in this gravity she had been born in and he had not. I was the fourth one born on Genji, she chanted to herself desperately, Rita Byrne and Seigi Minoru and Cade Anson and...

The chanting didn’t help. She reached the village, and there stood Tykifizz, Tmafekitch’s daddy, and Rilla knew just from the expression on the small male’s four-eyed, snorkeled head that Tmafekitch had already gone.

Rilla didn’t even hesitate. She had filled her tanks, packed her supplies, done her safety check before they left Okuma Base, while Mommy and Daddy had been talking and talking and talking about carpet whales. What were carpet whales compared to Tmafekitch, her friend? Just nothing. She didn’t have the translator because that might have made her parents suspicious, but probably Tmafekitch’s daddy could understand her well enough without the translator. And, of course, once she found Tmafekitch, she wouldn’t need any stupid old translator.

Speaking very slowly and putting in as many Ihrdizu sounds as she could—only it was hard to know which ones were really Ihrdizu and which ones were hers and Tmafek-itch’s!—she said to Tylcifizz,

“Which path did she take? Where does she search? Through whose food pond does she mate?”

She asked all the questions she could think of, keeping one eye out for Mommy or Daddy. But they didn’t come. Still fighting? Or did they just think she was sulking and would be back?

She would, of course. She knew that, no matter how much of a baby they thought she was. She knew she couldn’t really live off the Genji land, and she knew Tma-fekitch couldn’t really take Rilla with her. But Rilla could say good-bye. They weren’t going to cheat her out of that.

Once she had all the information Tykifizz could give her, she started off after her friend, her lost soul mate, to say good-bye.

Jordan Dane was not a scientist. He had been chosen for First Conciliator precisely because he was not and thus was assumed not to favor any one scientific discipline over another. He had come to Murasaki System as librarian, highly trained at storing, cross-referencing, retrieving, and preserving other people’s science, a QED specialist consid-erably less valuable at what he did than the QED itself.

Looking at the screen displaying close-up transmissions of Chujoan Chupchups camped in rings around writhing vast mats of snug, Dane found himself wishing—for the first time—that he was a scientist.

Tatsumi was watching him with her quiet eyes. What she said surprised him.

“Where were you born, First Conciliator?”

“I’m a Spacer, Tatsumi-san. I thought you knew that.”

She bowed slightly, apology for the inquisitiveness. “From what place?”

He smiled at her. “A habitat. It no longer exists. An accident. They were attaching antimatter thrusters to the hollowed-out asteroid, preparing to move it to a better lo-cation. The whole thing blew.–

“Ah. Clayton’s World.”

He bowed in return, a playful mimicry. So the details had reached even Murasaki. He didn’t like talking about it. But one more sentence seemed necessary: expiation. “I was away at graduate school on Earth. Harvard.”

“So you are an exile.” she said, so neutrally he knew he did not have to say any more. She would not probe. Together they watched the Chupchups camped around the snug vats, until Suzy Tatsumi said in her formal, pretty voice, “I think, First Conciliator, that someone should go talk to Mr. Philby.”

She was shocked at how much Philby had changed.

Tatsumi looked in her minor every morning; although the changes there were gradual, she did not delude herself that the lined face and smooth, gray-flecked hair belonged to the same young woman who had sobbed on the beach as the .Ihrdizu stoned to death Robert Carnot and Aaron Kammer. She was slower, thicker, in her prime but past her bloom. Yet she was still the same person, recognizable in that mirror. Edward Philby was not recognizable. For a long heart-stopping moment, he did not look human.

But that was illusion. Of bulk: the once sleek and well-fed body weighed no more than sixty kilos. Of hair: Philby had none left. Most of all, of skin: Philby’s very brown face, neck, arms, and bare chest were covered with mela-nomas, as if he had sat deliberately in the ultraviolet light for a very long time. As perhaps he had. The cancers, Tat-sumi could see, were killing him.

She tried to hide her shock as she approached him. He sat on a bench in front of a standard portable dome among five other domes at the time artists’”colony.” He wore pants, boots, and a breathing filter.

Tatsumi, who wore a full suit, thought that at this air pressure, not sea level but not mountaintop either, he must be very uncomfortable. He gave no sign of it.

“Mr. Philby,” she said formally. “It is Dr. Tatsumi.”

She wasn’t sure what she expected. Slowly, slowly Philby rose, nodded, and led the way into the dome.

Tatsumi removed her helmet. (Was it completely safe? He looked crazed. But she stood between him and the air lock, and it was painfully obvious by how much she was the stronger.) She bowed slightly.

“I have come to see you, after all this time, to ask you once again about something. Alas, it is a painful topic: that last day on the beach, at the Ihrdizu fishing association, when Robert Carrot and Aaron Kammer died.”

—In time, everything must happen,” Philby said.

She nodded politely. “So say many Oriental philosophers.”

“And you think I am merely echoing them. But I mean something much subtler, something derived from physics,” Philby said. She remembered that he had debated philosophy for—literally—years with Robert Carrot, through ship-to-ship link. She heard, too, what she had missed in his first, five-word utterance: the cancer had in-vaded his throat.

“What is it that you do mean?” she said still polite.

“For everything there is an equal and opposite inac-tion. That is basic physics. It is also cosmic design. For everything, if one waits and witnesses with enough pa-tience, there is a corrective swing in events. Like a pendulum.”

“Even manslaughter,” Tatsumi said, using the curious Western term. She could think of no other. For what had happened on the beach,—murder” was not the right word.

A faint gleam shone in Philby’s sunken eyes. “Yes. You understand.”

“Not completely,” Tatsumi said honestly. “You are waiting to witness events that will correct your ...

your moral guilt?”

“I bear no moral guilt,” Philby said hoarsely. “I wait to see the swing of the pendulum, for aesthetic satisfaction. I am an artist.”

Time artists. “But,” Tatsumi could not help saying, although it was no part of what she had come to say, “an artist does not just wait. An artist participates in the process.”

“We participate,” Philby said. “Ask any court if the witnesses are not participants in a trial.”

“But that is justice, not art.”

“Ah,” said Philby, “but the wisdom of our art is that we do not recognize the distinction. We know that only art creates true justice.”

Tatsumi gave it up. Subtlety interested her, self-serving rationalization did not. “Mr. Philby, will you look at some pictures I have brought?”

“An artist witnesses whatever part of the design is entrusted to him.”

She opened the packet she carried, hard copy from the QED. “These are carpet whales. They are all—all, Mr. Philby—gathering at a point in the strait between Southland and Nighland. The point is as close to the sub-Chujo node as possible, the actual node being inland. This picture here shows one himatid that has rolled over to expose its ventral side. The formation in the air above is an illusion of exu-dates, gases and water, reflected and refracted by thousands of minute bits of shiny metal, which it must have taken the whale millennia to collect and embed at precise locations between its teeth and stomata.”

Philby did not seem surprised to hear this.

“What does the illusory formation look like to you, Mr. Philby?”

He said promptly, “It’s Aaron Kammer.”

“Mr. Philby, you told me ... “ No. Wrong. “Mr. Philby; have you ever seen anything like this before?”

“On the beach. After he died.”

“After?”

“I walked between the whale skins. What was left of the whale skins_ And I saw him, just like that, red and green ribbons of light.” To her shock, Tatsumi saw that there were tears in his sunken eyes.

Tears of gladness. What strange ideas of absolution had been touched in his mind by all this?

She said, “Just like this yOu saw him. After he was dead.”

“I told you so at the time, Tatsumi-san.”

“Yes. You did.” How cold she had been to him, how furious, how judgmental. How young. “You said some-thing else, as well. You told me what Kammer’s final words were before the... the massacre started.”

“Yes. He said, ‘They’re the ones. They’re the ones, and you’re killing them!”‘

She had remembered right. She let out her breath. “Thank you, Mr. Philby.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Do you need anything? Pain blockers?”

“You have brought me everything a time artist needs.”

He was too sick to debate with, even if debating had been her style. Too sick, too old, too peculiarly shamed. Tatsumi had not known Westerners were capable of such deep, all-accepting shame. Certainly she had not known Philby was. She had been wrong. Or perhaps over the course of twenty years he had changed, grain by grain, like those flabby plants that petrify into unbreakable stone.

As she climbed back into her flyer, she thought of two things, turning them over and over like the smooth white stones in her grandmother’s miniature sand garden in Kyoto. The first was what Aaron Kammer had said to her, Suzy Tatsumi, about the Chupchups on Chujo: “Learned much myself on Chujo about understanding and standing between. Masters and slaves. Everybody’s right, everybo-dy’s wrong.” She had not known what he meant. Now, seeing Philby, who had been so wrong and had worked it around in his mind to a process of right that united justice and art—a process she had just contributed to with her prosecutorial questions—she was not so sure. Right and wrong looked more complex to her now. And mastery—of anything—seemed much dimmer.

The other thought was that it had been years since she had remembered her grandmother’s sand garden in Japan, on Earth, her birth-home.

“I tell you, she’s gone!” Jane Johnson screamed. “She’s gone, looking for that damn iguana!”

Bruce Johnson stopped short. The Ihrdizu had never in the least reminded him of iguanas—where did Jane, even in her hysteria, get that? And it wasn’t like her to be so ethnocentric, so utterly imperial about the aliens.... She was a scientist. Even if the science was only botany.

“Calm down,” he, said. “She’s probably playing in the Carrot temple, or sulking somewhere.... She knows how much air is in her tanks and, what her physical capacity is. You underestimate her, Jane.

She’ll be all right.”

“Which only means you don’t want to bother to go looking for her! Well, I’m going!” She yanked on her suit, crying.

Bruce suppressed his irritation. He didn’t know what was happening to Jane. She had always been high-strung, but now...

“High emotion means an increased chance of acci-dents, Jane. Look, if you have to go out, just calm down first. Ftilla’s all right, she’s a Genjian.... “

“What? What did you say?”

“I said, she’s a Genjian.”

Jane sobered immediately. Coldly, methodically, she pulled on and sealed her suit, ran through the safety checks. She did not look at him or speak to him until she actually had her hand on the air-lock recycle. Then she said, in a voice he had never heard from her before, “She’s a Ca-nadian child.”

The QED chimed, not softly,, which meant a trans-mission of crucial, although not life-threatening, impor-tance. Bruce turned his head toward the QED. When he turned it back, Jane was gone.

Unnecessary. Rilla would be fine. She would be back in an hour. Unnecessary, and therefore wasteful.

“Transmission from Chujo,” the QED said. A Japa-nese head appeared, someone Bruce didn’t recognize.

“This is Dr. Kenzo Ohkubo,” the man said in English; Bruce recognized the slightly mechanical undertones of the QED translator. Dr. Ohkubo was speaking Japanese. am at temporary base near the sub-Genji point, twenty-five de-grees twenty-eight minutes south, where the largest of the snug mats is growing. I wish to play for my esteemed col-leagues on Genji, in which I include all scientists in reach of the information network, the recording of an interview I have just had with a Chujo Master.”

Bruce whistled. He wasn’t sure what impressed him more: that the Japanese, who tended to be formal and a little proprietary about scientific information, were sharing the interview, or that they had finally gotten one with a Chupchup at all. After twenty-eight years!

“We did not obtain this information by our efforts,” Dr. Ohkubo said. “It was fieely given. The Chujoan walked from his camp near the snug vats to our dome. When I advanced to greet him, he spoke as follows.”

The camera angle shifted; it was not a particularly good picture. The image of the Chujoan wavered, steadied; no one at the temporary camp, hopeless of any real contact, had prepared for this abrupt appearance. Bruce stared, fas-cinated, at the noseless humanoid face with the huge gold-brown eyes, slitted mouth, and flaring, scalloped ears. How good would the translation be? For two and a half decades the Japanese had been dropping transmitters into Chujoan encampments and farm centers. This electronic eavesdrop-ping had yielded only a meager vocabulary and the knowl-edge that Chupchups would not shine at cocktail parties. The QED translation program would not have much to go on.

But speak it did, forty-five seconds of trills, twitters, and growls. Bruce had the eerie impression that the Chu-joan had slowed down its speech, making an effort to be more intelligible. When the statement was over, a callused, blue—fingernailed hand extended toward the camera, offer-ing a smooth blue box about half a meter square. A human hand moved into camera range and grasped the box. Then the Chupchup simply turned and loped off.

Dr. Ohkubo reappeared. “We have run this speech through the best language programs we have.

Many of the Chujoan words were new to the computer. This is the clos-est approximation we can make, going first to Japanese and then to English. Please bear in your mind that it may not be correct.”

The voice of the translator began: “It *islwill be* *time/an animal hunted/a problem solved.*

Snug

travels

to

Genji.

*Error/hunting-mistake-which-leaves-an-animal-unkilled*

is

*solvecl/hunted/built/compkted.* Cities are empty because Chupchups not *inside/needfiil of/tied down for the kill* the cities. We eat the *beings* of Genji. The *beings* of Genji eat us. It *is/will be* *time/an animal hunted/a problem solved.*”

,

Dr. Ohkubo returned and said something brief in Jap-anese. Bruce, watching, wondered what he could have said for the translator to produce the idiomatic, resigned English translation: “There you have it,”

Jesus Christ, Bruce thought. Jesus H. Christ.

Then he remembered that he was a scientist and should take the flyer posthaste to either Okuma.

Base or—better-where the carpet whales were gathering as close as possible to the sub-Chujo node.

Only then did he remember that Jane had the flyer, looking for Rilla.

“Poetry,” Dane said. “It could be poetry. The last line repeating the first...

“The only clear points,” said Don Serranian, one of the physicists, “is that the snug is supposed to travel to Genji, and that something is supposed to be settled. But there’s no way that snug could cross space!”

“Are you sure?” Miyuki Kaneko said. Her voice held an underlying tremor that made Tatsumi watch her closely. “There has been for generations now speculation about bioengineered spaceships.”

Everyone spoke at once then. Dane tried to follow the arguments behind the positions taken by highly trained minds, none of whom agreed with each other.

“The same word carries connotations of ‘time,’ of ‘an animal hunted,’ and of ‘a problem solved.’ Is that threefold meaning a construct of our translator, or does it imply a fatalistic belief system in which time is measured by what events are resolved in a given span?”

“The Chupchups seem to be saying that they aban-doned the cities by their own choice, because they no longer needed them. Not because the race had degenerated to a pre-city level. Which, I’d like to remind everyone, is what I maintained all along.”

“What are the implications of ‘We eat the beings of Genji’? The translation of ‘eat’ is firm, but the translation of ‘beings’ is tentative, level-three uncertainty—are they talking about the Ihrdizu? Are the Chujoans possibly can-nibalistic? Or could they have been once?”

“The next sentence is The beings of Genji eat us.’ That seems to imply a metaphorical interpretation rather than a literal one. Perhaps the entire message is metaphor!”

“If the Japanese would bring that blue ‘book’ to Genji where the rest of us could have a crack at it—”

“Ihrdizu folk sayings like the groveling ‘May I never rise to Chujo’ seem to me to imply an exalted state for Chujo. If it represents a kind of perfected being-hood, a Nirvana—”

“Ihrdizu ecological disasters—”

“—carpet whales—”

They were not getting anywhere, Dane saw. They never did get anywhere. Individual researches illuminated this small fact of the Murasaki biosphere, or that small fact, or a tentative connection between this and that. But they never got anywhere creating a coherent overall picture. Not in thirty years. Did that mean that humans couldn’t grasp a big picture so alien? Or that there was no coherence to be grasped?

Dane didn’t believe the latter.

Why not? Because he just didn’t. The universe was not that fractured. Or human comprehension that limited.

“We do not really understand anything happening here,” Tatsumi said in her pretty voice, and he looked at her, startled to hear his own thoughts articulated so clearly.

Tatsumi smiled at him. No one else even heard her: they were all too loud with desperate speculation.

Why desperate? Dane wondered. But then he knew: contradictory elements in their adopted world made hash of the limited understanding they had already struggled so hard to achieve. The, lack of understanding made them feel excluded. Genji and Chujo, by its sudden eruption of events so clear to their own species and so weird to the humans, were shutting the humans out. They felt exiled.

And he, Dane, did not? No. Why not?

Tatsumi said to him, in a voice barely above a whis-per, “You, Jordan-san, already felt like an exile.”

Rilla stopped walking to check her tanks. Not quite halfway used. She could walk a little ways yet.

But not far. She would have to find Tmafekitch soon. Or

She was farther away from the field dome than she had ever been, except in the flyer. The village was far be-hind. Around her were no birth pools, no Carnot temple, no food ponds. Only low yellow plants and marshy ground and low hillocks and the path, hard and firm, that genera-tions of Ihrdizu had worn for trade. There were no people. Rilla didn’t like to admit how much she wanted to see a snorkel waving above the vegetation. Anybody’s snorkel, it didn’t even have to be Tmafekitch’s.

How could Tmafekitch leave without saying good-bye! How could she!

Rilla walked on a little farther. Above, Chujo was full face, the color of the sand that she and Tmafekitch used to build domes with. Chujo was streaked at one edge with white clouds. It was ugly.

Tmafekitch wasn’t there.

Her tanks suddenly chimed, very loud. They were half empty.

Rilla sat down on a rock beside the path and started to cry. She had to go back. She wasn’t going to see Tma-fekitch after all. She had to go back or she would die. She couldn’t even, in fact, afford the time and energy to sit here and cry.

Life was awful. Nobody had ever told her life was going to be this awful.

Rilla got heavily to her feet, and Tmafekitch came trotting around a hillock.

“Tmafekitch! You’re here!”

Tmafekitch stopped dead and clicked her feet in as-tonishment. Her snorkel waved in loops. She said to Rilla in their personal language, “Why are you here? Where do you go?”

“I came to find you! You left before I came back!–

“It was time for my mating journey,” Tmafekitch said, still clicking and looping. “Are you going on a mating journey now?”

“Of course not!” Rilla said. This was not the meeting she had envisioned. A new thought occurred to her. ‘‘Tma-fekitch—why are you traveling back toward your village?–

“I cannot go on my mating journey.”

“Cannot?” Rilla said. She had never heard of such a thing. “Why not?–

“Because it is ****.”

Rilla had never heard the word. Something odd in Tmafekitch’s snorkel loops made her think suddenly that Tmafekitch had never said the word, either. But that didn’t make any sense. Rilla wished she had the translator with her after all.

“Tmafekitch, what does that word mean? The one you just said?”

Tmafekitch came close to Rilla’s rock. She sat down on her tail, then got up again, which meant she was thinking hard. Her snorkel looped wildly. A flock of silverbirds flew overhead, and only one of her upper eyes tracked it, so distracted was she. Finally she sat down again on her tail and put her face very close to Rilla’s, as talkers often did when they came to the exciting parts in a story they were talking.

“It means time. And an animal killed after long hunt-ing. And... a problem solved.”

“What?” Rilla said. “What?”

Tmafekitch took her face away. The silverbirds suddenly started to screech, and Rilla looked up. A flyer ap-proached. Mommy or Daddy. Or both. Probably furious.

“Oh, uneaten turds,” she said. “Trnafekitch, are you really coming back to your village?”

“Yes.”

“What about your mating journey?”

“I cannot go. It’s ****.”

There it was again. Rilla had never heard of anything interrupting a mating journey once it was started. “What about your heat flush?”

“Gone.”

Rilla had never heard of that, either. “Will it come back?”

“Oh, yes.”

“When?”

“After ****.”

The flyer landed. Through the window Rilla could see Mommy, gesturing at her furiously. Nothing was going right. Except, of course, that Tmafekitch was coming back to the village. Even if that made no sense.

“Tmafekitch—how come you never told me this word before, if it’s so important it can stop your mating journey?”

Tmafekitch seemed to think deeply. Her snorkel ceased all motion. A long moment went by, in which Mommy climbed out of the flyer and stalked toward Rilla.

“Because,” Tmafekitch finally said, “it was not be-fore in me.”

“That’s crazy!” Rilla burst out angrily.

“Yes,” Tmafekitch agreed. “The Masters are some-times crazy. They did not put the word in the Ihrdizu. Not before. Only now.”

All over Genji, Ihrdizu on their mating journeys stopped, turned around, and walked back to their villages. Researchers raced to question them. Each little-she re-sponded courteously.

“It is ****.”

Fishing boats stopped fishing, stowed the catch they already had, and sailed back to their fishing ports. Two scientists, one Japanese and one Anglo, took flyers to two different ports, made ritual-greetings, and asked why the boats had returned.

“It is ****,” the Ihrdizu said.

A three-day festival in the Southland central valley, a gathering of two thousand Ihrdizu, came to a sudden halt. The festival-goers packed up their young and their provi-sions and started back to their own food ponds and birthing pools. The itinerant talkers who had come for the festival, who had much local fame but no food ponds or birthing pools of their own, each went with a different group of Ihrdizu. Bruce Johnson flew to Southland to question as many talkers as he could. Why did the festival stop? Why were the talkers each boarding with an Ihrdizu household instead of continuing on their accustomed circuit?

“It is ****,” the talkers said.

“How the hell did a Chujoan word get into their vo-cabulary?” Don Serranian cried. “A word that apparently none of them knew before the same identical moment all over the fucking planet?”

Bruce Johnson said, “Hard-wired. Into the genetic structure. Had to be. All set for conscious access at some signal. some timing system.” Johnson hardly slept. Dane thought. As tightly wrapped as Serranian, Johnson none-theless was responding differently to this latest develop-ment. He was completely absorbed, forgetting even to eat, to bathe. Serranian, like many of the others, was frustrated and scared by events that made no sense. Johnson loved it.

Serranian said tightly, “What sort of signal?”

“How should I know?– Johnson said. He walked in tight circles in front of the QED. “Maybe astronomical, like the minute variations in light that trigger some bird migrations on Earth. Maybe internal.

If knowledge was stored in the Ihrdizu brain, passed on generation after gen-eration, until some chemical inhibitor was removed in the synapses ... Yes! Yes!” He began punching keys furiously.

“Removed how?” Serranian yelled. “You can’t just have spontaneous genetic combustion!”

“We can’t,” Johnson said gleefully. “Can the Ihrdizu?”

“No!”

“How the hell do you know? Could they have an out-side trigger?”

“Like what?” Serranian was furious; Dane actually thought he might strike Johnson. Dane moved swiftly be-tween them. A First Conciliator was not supposed to be a bodyguard, but to keep fanatics conciliated ...”

But Johnson seemed to calm down a little, even if Serranian did not. His next words were very soft, almost inaudible. His face shone. “An outside trigger. Yes. Tell me, Serranian—how do the carpet whales communicate with each other across huge expanses of ocean?”

“We don’t know!”

“Carpet whales,” Johnson said musingly, his face still radiant. “Carpet whales.” He started typing rapidly in QED mode, inputting to the fuzzy-logic program he had set up to coordinate event-data. After a while he leaned back and watched the screen.

“Will you look at that,” he said softly. “Just look at that.”

Every mature carpet whale on Genji had arrived at the Southland-Nighland strait, south of the sub-Chujo node.

They blanketed the sea for kilometers with their sin-uous black flatness billowing on the waves, their dozens and dozens of pairs of thin waving tentacles. The largest of the whales stretched a hundred meters long, twenty-five meters wide. There was not enough food in the sea for all the stomatalike mouths to graze on, so the himatids seemed to have simply stopped eating. They did not move much. However alien they were, it seemed obvious what the carpet whales were doing.

They were waiting.

All over Genji, the Ihrdizu returned to their villages, and waited.

On Chujo, the mats of snug grew and writhed, and, circled around the mats, the Chupchups waited.

The humans looked at each other. The fascinated ones, Dane thought, the ones like Bruce Johnson, ran data pro-gram after program, straining even the QED’s powers. The others, the ones used to the orderly accumulation of knowl-edge that grew rather than decreased in logical connections, sat around tight-lipped—and cursed the waiting.

“I want her out of here!” Jane Johnson said to her husband. “I want Rilla on the orbital ship, away from all this! It’s just too weird, and nobody knows what will happen!’

‘

“I won’t go!” Rilla said. “I want to stay here on Genji!”

Jordan Dane doubted that Bruce Johnson actually heard either of them.

“In my grandmother’s sand garden,” Suzy Tatsumi said reflectively to Dane, “were quiet empty spaces, bare sand or bare polished rock, as much a part of the design as the living bonsai.”

For days there were storms. Powerful winds blew Gen-ji’s thick air masses. Rain whipped across the seas. In the low-lying villages, the waters rose dangerously above flood tide.

But then the winds blew themselves out, the clouds dissipated, and one of Genji’s rare clear skies shone above noontime Southland. And the carpet whales, the massed and tightly packed carpet whales in the Nighland-Southland strait below Chujo, all rolled over to their ventral sides.

Signals began to flash into the sky.

Grains of metal from the seas, grains gathered over millennia and apparently stored in precisely measured amounts in precisely measured locations on the ventral sur-face, reflected the light of Murasaki.

Clouds of gases re-leased from millions of stomata refracted the light. Focused it. Sent it toward Chujo, which was not in eclipse with Genji and therefore was experiencing midnight, a moonside midnight clear and cloudless at the sub-Genji point.

“The light signals are of course very faint. Far too faint to activate any phototropisms in the snug mat,” Kenzo Ohkubo transmitted from Chujo. He said it as if he did not expect this information to make the slightest bit of differ-ence, as indeed he did not. They had all, or nearly all, given up expectations.

What expectations should E. coli have about the next food to come down the human gullet? Ohk-ubo, thought Jordan Dane, sounded almost jaunty. He was not among the scared ones.

The electromagnetic signals—clearly more than just light—went on striking the great snug mat on Chujo. The mat stirred. “A hive mind, perhaps,” Bruce Johnson said.—“Or something.” —

All around the moonside of Genji, the Ihrdizu sat still, remembering things they had never before known.

Nearly every scientist flew, after wild negotiations for flyer space, to the Southland-Nighland strait, and agreed-upon research spheres be damned. OW= Base was effectively deserted. Technicians remained, along with Jordan Dane, Suzy Tatsumi, and—to Dane’s sur-prise—the Johnsons. At first Dane thought that Bruce Johnson was staying for Jane’s sake. Later he realized that Johnson wanted to be near the QED. preferring to analyze data than to gather it.

Jane Johnson, tight-lipped, disappeared into the dorm dome, taking, Rilla with her.

Bruce, Dane, and Tatsumi were gathered at the screen in the main dome when Miyuki Kaneko appeared on the all-channel transmission from Chujo. Unlike Kenzo Ohk-ubo, Miyuki’s voice was not jaunty. It was perfectly steady, without shading but not empty, as white light is without color because it contains all colors.

Miyuki said formally, “To all human scientists: The Chujo team has succeeded in opening the Chujoan ‘book’ voluntarily given to us by the Chujoan spokesman. The artifact is a container of opaque and very hard glass. It has taken the team so long to open both because they did not wish to break it and because the method of closing, locking, and opening is unlike anything humans use. Dr. Ohkubo, who is at the snug-mat site, has asked me to describe to all of you exactly what we have found.”

She drew a careful breath. “To call the artifact a ‘book’ is incorrect, although to call the cairns a

‘library’ is not incorrect. The glass box contained a pile of etchings on thin plates of glass. These are unmistakably numbered by dots in the left-hand corner of each: one dot for the etching on the top, two dots on the next we encountered. We will transmit the etchings now, with commentary on what we have learned thus far.”

“Listen to her. Prerecorded, all of it. As good as al-ready written the journal paper,– Bruce Johnson said. He could not sit still. He danced in front of the screen, his eyes burning with excitement and fatigue.

Tatsumi, pouring tea for Jordan Dane, said, “Formal-ity can be such a protection against disbelief.”

The huge mat of snug, covering the entire floor of the valley, wrinkled, stretched, slid. The Chupchups scrambled across its surface, heading for a crevasse that billowed steam. Streamers of sulfurous yellow billowed across the mat. Suddenly, one edge of the mat reared, jerked, and leapt into the sky. The edge struck the far side of the crevasse, to join with a second leaping edge. The two waves stuck, clung, forming a seamless whole. The bioloon started to billow along the crevasse.

“Not again,” Miyuki said, in the same formal voice in which a few hours ago she had recorded the contents of the Chujoan glass box. “They should not die again.”

No one heard her. The rest of the team recorded, scanned for samples left behind, controlled the movements of the robot probe that would fly as close alongside the rising bioloons as Kenzo Ohkubo dared. They observed. They were scientists.

“The first etching,” said the prerecorded Miyuki, “as you can see, shows two Chujoans standing with an Ihrdizu on what clearly seems to be the surface of Genji. Please look carefully at the Ihrdizu, who is a mature female. Around her snorkel is a ... a ‘necklace.’ It is an actual necklace, in miniature, made separate from the etching and then embedded in the glass.”

The picture of the etching held, then magnified the Ihrdizu’s snorkel. Dane leaned as close as possible to the screen. He realized he was breathing heavily. Like Bruce Johnson, he thought ruefully, and glanced at Tatsumi. She went on drinking her tea, her dark eyes large.

The screen transmitted an image of a corroded lump of metal. Miyuki’s voice said formally, “We all have known, of course, that the Ihrdizu once had metallurgy. This coin or medallion was found by the expedition’s first ecospecialist, Dr. Katsuyoshi Minoru, twenty-five years ago. Core samples taken under choice Ihrdizu seaside vil-lages have shown that, just as they have shown that the Ihrdizu culture flourished in waves, dying off and then be-ing rebuilt at least six separate times. Each time many other flora and fauna have died with them and never been replaced.

“A great question has always been: What caused the die-offs on Genji? What upset the ecological balance so much that the Ihrdizu had to fight for prime space, by the sea but on very high ground, just to survive? What ecolog-ical disaster raced through Genji, changing everything eighty generations ago in a breathtakingly short space of time?”

The snug mat was lifting itself. Alive with purpose, rippling, its center axis bulged, pulling the rest of it along the ground with a hiss like a wave sliding up .a beach. It shed pebbles, making, itself fighter, letting go of its birthplace.

Beneath, in the vat, hydrogen by-products of the snug combined with other gases. The mat rose, shaping itself into a teardrop. A teardrop with pockets. From the other valleys of the volcanic ridge, other bioloons rose, each bearing a load of Chujoans clinging to the sides, scrambling into the pockets.

“They will all die again,” Miyuki said. “All die! Like the successive generations on Genji, like the carpet whales slaughtered by the Ihrdizu ... death. All death!”

Kenzo Ohkubo looked away from his recording in-struments long enough to glance at her. He said quietly, “You forget yourself, Kaneko-san.”

The rebuke, gentle as it was, sobered her. She watched the bioloons rise to the sky, paced by the robot probe.

“The second etching,” said the formal Miyuki two hours earlier, “shows the same two Chujoans—computer analysis shows all four figures to have been etched from the same plate—standing still on Genji. This time the neck-lace-bearing Ihrdizu is dead at their feet. The plants around them are dead. The village behind them is in flames. The small birthing pool in the lower left corner is overgrown with what seems to be—this is just supposition—some sort of snug. It is not possible, given our current uncertainty about Chupchup culture, to read the identical expressions on the two Chujoan faces.”

“Grief,” said Jordan Dane at once. He glanced at Tat-sumi. She put her teacup on the table; it rattled in her fingers.

“They caused it,” Bruce Johnson said. “Dane—the Chujoans fucking caused the die-offs. Or that die-off, any-way. Look at that birthing pool. Snug. It was like the wine-skin plague, only this version attacked Genji-life-forms. The Chujoans were the bioengineers, and they fucked up, and they caused an ecological disaster!”

Dane said shakily, “You don’t know that.”

Johnson said, “I’m going to set a QED fuzzy-logic program right now to correlate the data and deduce the probabilities.”

Tatsumi said, “He said—” She stopped.

Dane turned toward her. Her face, ordinarily the clear pale gold of good brandy, had gone white. He put a hand

on her shoulder, gently, the first time he had ever touched her. “Who said what, Suzy?”

“Kammer. He said to me, after the Chujoans had cov-ered him with that snug, twisted and deformed him ... “

“What, Suzy? What did Kammer say?”

“‘Learned much myself on Chujo about understanding and standing between. Masters and slaves.

Everybody’s right, everybody’s wrong.”

“Masters,” Dane said. “Masters of bioengineering.” They watched the screen, waiting for the next etching.

The bioloons soared into the blue-black sky of Chujo. On the ground, the long lines of Chupchups who had not climbed onto the snug watched the others go.

Miyuki strained her eyes until the bioloons were small dots. Still they kept rising, high into the atmosphere. She put her hand over her mouth, realized what she was doing, and took her hand away.

This time she would not be sick.

She would not.

Ohkubo’s team had already erected the dome of dou-ble-thick shielding material. Last time, they had had no protection. Last time, when the Chujoan bodies had started to hurl back toward the planet, still trailing streamers of snug, it had been only chance that none of the splattering corpses had struck any of the human researchers. Only the body fluids had.

She would not be sick.

Inside the dome, the researchers crowded around the screen receiving transmissions from the robot cameras pac-ing the bioloons. Ohkubo focused on one large bioloon, adjusted the telescopic lens, and split the screen to show transmissions both from a distance large enough to see the bioloon whole, and from a few meters away from one pocket. On the second screen, a golden-brown Chupchup face with large-pupiled green eyes stared at Miyuki. If the researchers had known enough to name Chupchup expres-sions, she told herself with rare sarcasm, she would have said the face was exalted.

She turned away from the screen, not wanting to see him die.

“The third etching, which you see here, is ... is ...” The prerecorded voice faltered.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Bruce Johnson said, not prayerfully.

“—is perhaps stylized rather than, literal. We know from the carvings in the abandoned cities of Chujo that the Chujoans are capable of stylized representation. Or perhaps the etching is literal.”

A line divided the top of the drawing from the bottom. The line might have been a sea cliff, or a shoreline, or nothing at all. Above the line, the same two Chujoans-Dane did not need a computer analysis to know they were the same ones as in the first two etchings—knelt, their heads bowed, staring below the line. Below the line, a car-pet whale swam, its dozens of “eyes,” those sensory or-gans located between each pair of tentaclelike –arms,” all turned toward the Chujoans. The orientation of the eyes was painstakingly drawn. The himatid regarded the penitent Chupchups, who regarded them back.

Johnson laughed, a slightly sour note. “It’s a story. Just another myth, another talking.”

“It’s not a myth,” Dane said. He wondered how he knew. “The carpet whales somehow judged the Chujoans for the mess they had made of the Genji ecology. Well, maybe not ‘judged’—but got told about it anyway. Or something.”

Johnson started frantically feeding data into his fuzzy-logic program.

Tatsumi said quietly, “The carpet whales made the illusions of Kammer. Of Kammer in his tatters of snug. Of Kammer dead, just as Philby saw him on the beach after the massacre.”

“The himatids are very old,” Dane said. “Not even Holden knows how old.”

“Master and slave,” Tatsumi said. “Did I ever tell you what Edward Philby said to me about time, art, and justice?”

Dane didn’t answer.

“He said our great failing was that we could not rec-ognize that they were the same things.”

High in the atmosphere above Chujo, the bioloons be-gan to change.

The robot cameras recorded it all, from several angles, at several different depths, with several different levels of magnification. There was no mistake. The Chujoans in the pockets of the bioloons, all at exactly the same moment, extended their hands straight above them, their humanoid legs straight below. They went stiff, long rigid axes of stiff-ness. The pockets around them grew as the snug shifted violently, then sealed itself. Each rigid human was sealed in a pocket of snug: giving warmth, conserving air. Around these rigid axes the bioloon shifted with incredible swift-ness, changing shape too precisely for anyone to think it was by chance.

“What do they do?” Ohkubo cried. “They are cre-ating an ... an aerodynamically feasible shape—”

The gases in the bioloon’s central cavity suddenly shot out a point near groundside, and the bioloon—no longer shaped like a balloon—shot forward. The electronic match-ers on Chujo, all except Ohkubo, fell silent. Miyuki felt an emotion creep over her she could not name. The Chupchup emotion, her own—she could no longer name anything. She could only watch, the glass etchings dancing before her eyes.

Finally someone said, the voice hoarse, “If the bio-loons manufacture more hydrogen through photosynthetic processes, maybe even other gases as well ... “

Someone else said, –We know the snug can interact with the Chupchup body, drawing on those resources as well....”

“There is a tremendous amount of energy stored in snug chemical bonds.... “

“At their current altitude, how much escape velocity would they need ... “

“How much time would it take, sealed in those pock-ets ... Of course, if the bioengineered process has the ca-pacity to manufacture additional gases for breathing as well as propulsion ... “

“How could they have calculated the right entry point, the right angle for reentry ... No, no, it isn’t pos-sible “

“How do we know what is possible? We cannot even see the inside of those ... craft.... “

The bioloons continued reshaping themselves.

At the sub-Chujo point on Genji, the carpet whales writhed and twitched, changing with minute precision the electromagnetic signals beaming into the sky.

“This fourth drawing,” said the formal Japanese voice, “shows a spacecraft of some sort covered with what appears to be formalized drawings of snug.

“We do not know whether snug can survive the in-terplanetary void, but this is partly because we do not know whether snug can take forms different from that observed on Aaron Kammer two decades ago. Bear in mind, also, that this etching, which appears to be taking the two Chupchups to Chujo away from. Genji, may just be a story. A myth. Or a stylized version of some actual historical hap-pening unrelated to the events of the other etchings but blended with them in the retelling over time. We simply do not know. The implied narrative conclusion drawn from this ordering of etchings, that the sentient humanoid race was somehow sent away from Genji and to Chujo at the behest or order of the himatids, may be completely erro-neous. Silly, even. We do not know.”

—Quarantine of experiment,” Bruce Johnson said. “Exile,—Jordan Dane said.

Tatsumi reached out and took his hand.

The bioloons glided into the comparatively narrow strait of space between the atmospheres of Chujo and Genji.

“Shape still flattening,” said Ohkubo tightly, moni-toring the transmissions from the robot cameras. “I think it’s gaining maximum surface area for some sort of pho-totropic activity, probably releasing gases.

Why did we not think to send along a probe capable of spectral analysis?”

This question was a lapse of control. Miyuki thought; everyone pretended Ohkubo, had not asked it.

The answer was obvious, anyway. They had not sent a probe to analyze unknown phototropic reactions that might furnish propul-sion capability because no one had known such an event was imminent. Or possible. Or thinkable.

How many of the Chupchups sealed in their—bioloon pockets were still alive? Had their life processes been slowed by the snug to require less breathable air, less heat, less gas exchange? It seemed probable. But, then, perhaps the snug ship had speeded up the Chupchup life processes to produce more of these things. How would the humans ever know? Unless, of course, the ship remained in analyz-able form once it reached Genji.

If it reached Genji.

“Entry into Genji upper atmosphere in ... three minutes, forty-two seconds,” someone said. “What will they do about the heat of entry?”

No one answered.

“Fifth comes an etching of a Chupchup city on Chujo. It is partially constructed. As you see, the actual hard labor appears to be mostly being performed by ‘trolls’; the Chup-chups are standing to the left-hand side absorbed in an un-differentiated artifact.”

—That’s no artifact, that’s my snug,”‘ Bruce Johnson said. He laughed and glanced around. Tatsumi would have said his manic gaze saw none of them. “They experimented with the damn stuff in the safety of Chujo until they got it right! I’ll be damned!”

Dane Jordan said, “You are making a supposition.” Tatsumi saw that he didn’t believe his own words. He, too, could recognize snug when he saw an etching of it.

The Japanese scientist, Miyuki, must have been under tremendous internal pressure, to draw herself back from the recognition.

“Sixth,” Miyuki said, “is this stylized picture, virtu-ally identical to a carving, one of many, in the abandoned Chupchup city.”

The animal informally named “dune tiger,” now pre-sumed extinct, glared at them from the screen. Its long, long tail stretched into a wraparound wreath that grew gnarled branches, sprouted ample flowers, twisted about itself to form a Chujoan profile, and finally curved back to be eaten by the tiger itself.

“Full circle!” Bruce Johnson yelled. “Yeeooweee! The Chupchups perfect the bioengineered solution to the ecological catastrophe they caused—and the cycle comes full circle. ‘Masters!’ Damn straight they call themselves fucking Masters!”

Dane said, “It could be just a story.... “

Johnson finally seemed to see him. “You don’t believe that.”

Dane didn’t answer. Finally, he said, “No. I don’t.”

“What was it that Chupchup said to the Japs?” John-son demanded. “The same multitiered concept the Ihrdizu have taken to spouting? ‘It *is/will be* *time/an animal hunted/a problem solved*.’ No wonder they abandoned their damn cities without any sense they’d degenerated! The lab part of the process was over! They were ready for field experiments!”

Tatsumi grasped what he was saying. For a second she went still, awed by the sheer size of it. A design for justice taking eighty generations, saving a world by exiling the perpetrators/saviors for only the most practical of motives .. All genetically hard-wired. Justice that was genetic.

,

Justice? Or was it art?

Johnson said gleefully, “And we thought we on Earth understood the self-regulating nature of a biosphere! We don’t know shit!”

Tatsumi could not understand why that should fill him with such pleasure.

When the bioloons hit the atmosphere, they changed again. The robot camera’s telescopic lens showed a ripple over every centimeter of their surface, subtle and uniform, as if the snug were reorienting at a cellular level. The al-bedo increased dramatically, acting as a heat reflector and hence a heat shield.

At the same time, the shape of each ship changed again. As the gravity well took hold upon the Chujoan cargo in its pockets, the ship broadened, thinned, curved in proportion to the increasing air pressure. By the time the ships were fully in the atmosphere, they were no longer ships but enormous, aerodynamically stiffened parachutes.

“Here,” said the prerecorded voice of Miyuki, and even through her formal control, her listeners felt her relief, “is the last of the etchings in the Chujoan library box.”

The screen showed parachutes, uneven parachutes un-mistakably of snug, falling through the sky.

Stylized Chu-joan faces adorned each parachute. On the ground—so clearly Genji ground, the edge of the sea decorated with Genjian plants and a watching Ihrdizu—the sea surged. It was thronged with carpet whales, watching the sky. From each himatid, the artist had etched a faint line to a bioloon, a line made of flowers and plants no human had yet seen anywhere on Genji.

“Coming back,” Dane Jordan said. His voice had turned husky. “Returning to Genji. Like the myth of Szikwshawmi. Angels coming from the sky to confer bio-logical strength on female Ihrdizu.” Was that what had happened once long ago?

“Guided by the carpet whales,” Tatsumi said.

Johnson said nothing; he was updating his fuzzy-logic deduction program on the QED like a man possessed.

“But there’s one thing I don’t understand,” Dane said.

Tatsumi said, with honest astonishment, “Only one?”

“If the carpet whales are to guide the Chujoans back to Genji with new bioengineered snug—if the whales are the masterminds—”

Johnson looked up, with scorn. “Masterminds! That’s all wrong. They’re genetically hard-wired for their role, too. None of the three races is any more in control than the others!”

“All right.” Dane drew a deep breath. “But if the signal or whatever comes from the himatids ... what hap-pened last time? Why did the Chujoans get into their bio-loons and start off into their atmosphere twenty-eight years ago, only to fall back and die? What went wrong?”

Johnson stopped typing. His forehead, sweaty with ex-ultation, furrowed.

Dane said, “If the carpet whales maybe started to give some kind of signal, and then the whole ...

‘mission’ aborted—why? Why wasn’t the signal what it was sup-posed to be?”

“Damn,” Johnson said. “I don’t know. Maybe the computer can come up with something.... “

Tatsumi saw it. Wavy lines appeared beneath her eye-lids, dizzying her, then righted. She said, “I know.”

The men turned to her. Johnson said, “You know why the carpet-whale signal failed last time?

Why?”

Again she saw Edward Philby, poor tormented justi-fied Philby dying of his cancers among the time artists. He stood in the field dome and repeated the last words Aaron Kammer had said, just before Kammer died:—‘They’re the ones! They’re the ones, and you’re killing them!”‘ The ones. The carpet whales.

She said, “The Ihrdizu killed too many. There were not enough left to make the right signals.”

Everybody’s right. Everybody’s wrong.

Cameras recorded frantically: on the south shore of Nighland, pointed at the sky; in fishing boats, as close to the himatids as the humans dared; in the sky itself, from out of flyer windows or on robot probes. No one had known what would happen, but they had known that something would„ and the humans, Dane thought, were ready. Weren’t they supposed to be? Why else had the Chujoans broken three decades of disdain to give humans the library etch-ings? Why else had the figure of Aaron Kammer appeared above a carpet whale in exudates and light? Why else, if not to invite the humans to watch this Murasaki System story. this wordless talking that dwarfed anything the hu-mans themselves had offered by way of petty Carnot tem-ples or small-scale offers to day-trip to the moon?

Dane turned to tell his thoughts to Suzy Tatsumi. But at that moment the screen in front of them, filled with sea spray from somebody’s misplaced camera, switched pic-tures. The images flowing into Okuma Base from the sea strait had been erratic for the last hour. Everyone at the strait was too busy recording to take time to route the best images to those unfortunates left behind at the base or at field camps. They, like the scientists on Chujo or the crew in the orbiting ship, didn’t count. Only the sea straits, glassy under the moon, counted. The off-site researchers took what the automatic transmitter sent, in the order the computer received it.

But now the image cleared. Johnson raced back from his QED terminal to stand with Dane and Tatsumi. None of them spoke.

The parachutes of snug hit a sudden gust in Genji’s treacherous, thick atmosphere. The affected bioloons wob-bled. Light, focused by millions of tiny reflectors embedded in the upturned ventral sides of carpet whales, flashed to-ward the parachutes. Immediately the parachutes adjusted shape, the snug expanding or contracting at the cellular level, until the chutes once more rode the wind.

,

The parachutes began to close at the bottom, meter by meter, until they once more became the shape of organic balloons. On each balloon, pockets bulged. Something within the pockets stirred faintly. The robot cameras, at extremely close range, showed the tops of the pockets begin to unseal.

“Thee gravity,” Dane said aloud. “So much greater than Chujo. Bones not developed for it, muscles

... Unless the landing of every one of those is perfect, the Chupchups won’t survive.... “

The image changed again, this time to the southern shore of Nighland, meters from the nearest carpet whale. Ihrdizu were wading into the water from the beach, hun-dreds of them. They submerged themselves to the tops of their tentacles. A few actually touched the edge of a carpet whale, which could bring its huge shape so close to land only because of its weird flatness. The Ihrdizu were laughing.

Light, reflected in exudates, danced and beamed from the carpet whales. A peculiar noise filled the air, louder than the laughing Ihrdizu or the lapping waves, a high-pitched rising and falling wail that might have been sonic signals. Might, have been keening. Might have been cheers.

As the bioloons came closer to land, most of them aimed at the sea, the carpet whales began to submerge. One-third, half, two-thirds of each hiniatid, the portions far-thest from the beach, sank under the water, leaving wide stretches of open sea between the remaining visible sections of whale. The light signals from these intensified. The noise rose in pitch. The first of the bioloons, splashed into the water.

And the himatids guided the rest of the Masters home.