"When all this is over, let's go find the parasites who were hacking you up, Cari," Keff said, making use of the sublingual implant in his jaw so the others couldn't hear him. "What with the bonuses from Ozran still in the bank, and the booty from this trip, we can afford to take even a year off."

"I hope the answers are still there to find," Carialle said in his aural implant.

"Look-be-hind-you," Tall Eyebrow spelled out aloud. "Look behind you," he signed suddenly to Keff. He spun in a circle, clutching his amulet in his long fingers.

"He's good," Carialle said. "Twenty-eight seconds, and it's not his native language."

More villains began to pour into the newly reconstructed great hall. Some were humans, brandishing weapons at Keff. Some were waist-high foes, snarling as they sought to surround Tall Eyebrow. Keff drew his sword, then hesitated, blade in midair. TE stood, gazing curiously at Keff, wondering why the man wasn't charging. The brawn looked at him, feeling as if he had seen them just now for the first time.

"I just had a horrible thought," Keff said, subvocally to Carialle. "What if it was TE's people, the Cridi, who were the ones stealing your components?"

"Don't think it hasn't occurred to me," Carialle said, her voice crisp in his ear. "I hope not. I'm going to be watching them like a bank guard every minute. But I so hope not."

"I hope not, too. I wouldn't be able to behave the same towards them if they almost killed you, inadvertently or not."

"I refuse to theorize in advance of the facts, as someone once said," Carialle stated firmly. "Right now the important thing is to get TE and his party safely to Cridi. When this is over, we'll go and find out the truth."

"When you will and where you will, my lady," Keff said, swallowing his concern. His partner was under control again. If he pushed for more details he might risk making her relive her ordeal. He raised his sword before his face in salute and, with a gallant bow toward her holographic image, charged into the fray.

"Well, come on, TE!" he shouted at the surprised globe-frog. "You're on the threshold of your first big battle. Hop to it!"

Chapter Two.

A few days later, Carialle interrupted the game and darkened the room to fill all the walls with views from her external sensors. The bright yellow-white, blue-white, and dull red dots of stars glimmered into view. Subtly, a white grid of low intensity divided the blackness into cubes.

"Gentleman and amphibians," she announced brightly. "Best visuals coming up. You see overhead on Y-vector the border between Sectors P and R. Imaginary, of course, visible only on benchmarking programs, but enhanced for your viewing pleasure. Beside us to starboard is a pentary of five stars known to Central Worlds as The Ring, a source of infernal radio interference to all space travelers hereabout. Below and to port, other constellations, brought in at treee treeemendous expense to the management. No shoving, please move along in an orderly fashion. And the entity ahead of us, frogs and sir, is star PLE-329-JK5, half of a binary otherwise known as your home system. And there, in that spot," she highlighted a single, dim yellow dot, two-thirds of the way around the ecliptic from them, "is your first real view of the planet Cridi. Welcome home, my friends."

"Hallelu!" Keff carolled, picking up datasheets and throwing them in the air.

Tall Eyebrow and Long Hand did a joyous dance together in midair around Keff's head. Small Spot bounded lightly from weight bench to wall to console and to Carialle's rack of paintings and back again, narrowly missing everyone else. They were all laughing in their shrill voices.

"How long until we make planetfall, Cari?" Keff called. He couldn't force himself to stop grinning. The corners of his mouth stayed glued up near his ears. He slapped his small friends on the back and shook their hands.

"A while yet," Carialle said. "I'm dumping velocity so I can drop into orbit at under 1,000 kilometers per hour. In the meantime, take a good look, folks. We made it."

The globe-frogs peeped and chirped to one another in high excitement, gesturing frantically at the holographic display.

"It is different from Ozran," Long Hand signed. "Orbit much wider. Cold?"

"Not recorded. We shall cope," Small Spot said. "See how warm the sun is! How lovely gold red."

"Who shall we meet?"

"Who indeed?"

Tall Eyebrow looked up at Keff in despair.

"What shall we say to one another? How different will we be from them?" he signed. "How will we interact?"

"Well," Carialle said, thoughtfully, "you've had a very small and limited gene pool to work with for ten centuries. I wouldn't be surprised if there hasn't been the beginnings of genetic shift, but it's unlikely to make any real difference. At worst you might need artificial assistance to interbreed with the majority population. We could offer Central Worlds' expertise in that department. Our scientists have no trouble fitting tab A into slot B, particularly with our knowledge of the confluent species that resembles yours in our biosphere. On the other hand, if you're just worried about your past experiences differing, I'd suggest you just be yourselves. They won't be expecting identical lines of development."

"Carialle!" Keff said in exasperation. Once a scientist, always a scientist. He turned to the aliens. "They'll just be glad to see you, TE."

"I do not know," Tall Eyebrow said, seeming dazed, staring at the tank. "It was not real until now."

"Well, it certainly is real," Keff said. He spotted an artifact ahead of them in the holoview. Its surface was too smooth to be natural. "What's that, Cari? Tracking stations? Signal beacon?"

"A little of each, I'd say. I'm getting a scan from it. Lots of subspace transmissions. I am recording them and attempting to translate."

"Feed it to me when you get something, please."

Keff sat down in the crash seat before the console and stared at the screen. He drummed his fingers on the console and tapped his toes in anticipation, feeling perfectly happy. This was a bonus, on top of the payoff for finding the civilizations on Ozran. To be able to observe an anthropological phenomenon heretofore unknown in human history: the first meeting of two different groups of the same race, divided for over a millenium. The linguistic diversity alone would provide him with the material for at least one blockbuster academic paper. Tall Eyebrow waddled over and hopped up to perch on the chair arm to watch with him.

"Anything yet?" Keff asked Carialle. "How about particle scans? How much activity is their spaceport seeing?"

"Patience, please. All I am seeing out there is a little debris, and some very old ion trails," Carialle said. The screen lit up with an overlay of green dust streaks that were scattered and stretched by the orbits of the planets in between. "I'd say no one's come through here in a long while."

"Always underfunded," Tall Eyebrow offered, with his hands turned slightly upward to show apology. "It is in the records. Resources small offered. Metal scarce. Volunteer work never enough, raw materials always short. Mission to Ozran one of three major projects to be funded in ten revolutions around the sun when my many-times ancestors had prepared for the journey to Ozran."

"Bureaucracy never changes anywhere," said Keff, sympathetically. Then he sat up straighter. "You don't mean you have memos dating from a thousand years back?"

"For every day," said the Frog Prince, with a satisfied gesture. "In all our troubles, that was never neglected. We have brought them with us for the perusal of the Cridi government."

Keff felt his jaw drop. The globe-frogs had loaded only a few containers into the cargo hold, and most had contained gifts. "In those little boxes you have a thousand years of records?"

"Communication system is kept frugally," Tall Eyebrow signed.

"I'm impressed with your systems," Carialle said.

"So am I," Keff said, with a whistle, promising himself a good rootle through the boxes when they were offloaded. "Talk about microstorage."

"Aha," Carialle announced. "It's sensed us. I'm receiving a hail from the orbiters."

She ran the data patterns through digital analysis, dividing the sum of on/not-on pulses by a range of prime numbers, formulae and logarithms, until she came up with a coherent 1028-unit wide digital signal. It wasn't a computer program, but a video transmission of an amphibioid wearing a glittering silver collar.

"Take a look at this," she said, and relayed it to the cabin screens. Keff was fascinated, but the three Ozranian globe-frogs were dumb with amazement.

"Not much obvious genetic difference, Cari," Keff said, staring at the image, looking at every detail. "Thank goodness for that."

The camera was centered on the Cridi's hands, rather than its face, which remained expressionless and still, staring at the video pickup with fixed, black eyes. The long hands snapped out signs in a quick sequence, then repeated it over and over again.

"I can read that. 'Identify yourself,'" Keff translated. " 'Do not proceed further.' "

"There's a spoken language, too," Carialle said. "Transmitted on either sideband of each copy of this signal on every frequency I tune into: wide band, narrow band, microwave, datasquirt, even a form of tight-beam. Very thorough. They want to make certain you don't miss it. Very musical, too. Listen." She put the sound over the cabin speakers. A pattern of peeps, creaks, chirps, and trills repeated over and over again. Keff squinted with concentration as he listened to the rhythmic squeaking.

"I bet it says exactly the same thing as the hand-jive." Keff's eyes gleamed. "Record it, please, Cari, and run it through the IT."

Keff's Intentional Translator program had been of assistance in learning the Cridi's sign language back on Ozran. He was constantly updating the system, which theoretically contained full grammar and vocabulary for every alien language that the Central Worlds had yet discovered. The program functioned with indifferent success most of the time. It rarely provided them with the key to an alien language when when an explorer needed it. More often, someone found a key first, then used IT to build up a translation system from collected data. The IT was still full of bugs, Carialle thought cynically, but Keff never seemed to be bothered by them. Still, he an explorer needed it. More often, someone found a key first, then used IT to build up a translation system from collected data. The IT was still full of bugs, Carialle thought cynically, but Keff never seemed to be bothered by them. Still, he had had been improving its interpretation of the Cridi signs. been improving its interpretation of the Cridi signs.

"Ah," Tall Eyebrow signed, his black eyes shining, "the language of science! We have all but forgone its use in the arid atmosphere of Ozran. The waters and the globes prevent sound from carrying, and we have had no amulets to broadcast it, so we let it drop except infrequently, in conclave."

"Interesting cultural redundancy," said Keff.

"Not at all. It makes sense for a technologically advanced race to develop some kind of oral language," Carialle said, thoughtfully. "Having to manipulate starship controls while signing home to mission control seemed to me like a difficult combination."

"But they had created remote power control," Keff protested.

Carialle's voice was sugared with sweet and insufferable reason. "What did they do before the amulets came along?"

"Sign is older," Long Hand explained, waving her hands for attention and interrupting the argument. "It was our first true trait of civilization. The small voice," here her hands went to her throat, and indicated diminuition with a finger and thumb, "does not carry as well as long sight. It came useful when science reached us, but not during our earliest years. Silence was essential to hunting together in the earliest days. We have good eyes and poorer ears. The wild food animals had good ears, but bad eyes. We must show silently to one another our intent. To us it meant survival."

"To which condition we were reduced on Ozran," put in Tall Eyebrow. "It has been so many generations since we did anything but survive. I am glad to see in the last year we have not forgotten how to think, how to invent with our hands. I shall not be ashamed to face my ancestors' other descendants." But the Frog Prince looked nervous all the same.

"But can you translate it?" Keff asked, almost bouncing with excitement. He gestured toward the screen where the silver-torqued amphibioid was still signing his message.

"If it has not changed since the mission to settle Ozran," Tall Eyebrow signed, "we may be able to." His hand waggled sideways to show uncertainty.

"This is a job for my all-purpose, handy dandy translating program." Keff flew to his console and opened the file. He sat listening avidly to the excerpt, keying in notes.

"But that trick never works," Carialle protested.

"Sure it does," Keff said with high good humor, purposefully ignoring her insult. "Especially, because this time I can cheat. I have a native speaker with me. TE, will you tell me what each of these sounds means?" He touched a control. "I'll slow it down, and you tell me where each phrase starts and stops, and then translate it for me."

"If I can," TE signed nervously. He slid his hand into his amulet to hover at the human's eye level.

They went through the recorded message together. Keff listened with his teeth clenched as the slowed-down chirrups grated through the speakers like chains being dragged up a gravel road. At the Frog Prince's signal, he tapped a computer key, designating the end of a word or phrase.

"It seems to be linear," he said to Carialle. "The IT is already beginning to crossmatch similarities between phrases on the tape. Multiple overlay of meaning beyond tense or gender would be more difficult to distinguish. Now, TE, what do they mean?"

Tall Eyebrow tried to translate each phrase into sign for them. He listened carefully, signing to Keff to replay each several times.

"The first is formula for diminishing forward velocity to zero, or 'halt,'" he said, holding up a skinny palm. "These next four I do not know. Some familiarity, but not enough. The first three are in command tense, but with certainty I cannot tell you their meanings."

"So there has been some linguistic shift," Keff said, nodding to Carialle's Lady Fair image on the wall. "It moves a lot faster than genetic or geographic alterations. Your ancestors might have used a more complex, extended phrase to mean whatever these do."

The globe-frog nodded, and tilted his head again to listen to the tape. "This is X=N, 'identify.' Three unknowns. This is the formula for no forward motion, 'not-proceed,' a command. More unknowns." Keff watched the small aliens hopefully as the tape ran out.

"Well, that's enough to go on," Carialle said. "It's very much what I comprehended from the visual portion of the signal. 'Stop, tell us who you are before you proceed.' Precisely what you'd expect from one of our own security beacons."

"Expressed entirely in mathematical concepts," Keff said. "Very interesting. TE, will you sing me the numerical sequence, and all the variables for IT?"

"With pleasure," the amphibioid said, still bobbing lightly on the air, "but what to do now about message heard?"

"Well, then, we reply as best we can," Keff said. "TE, do you want to do the honors?" He made way before the communications console, and courteously bowed the globe-frog into his own chair. "It's your home."

"I do not know what to do," the small alien said, looking up at Keff uncertainly. "What does one say to one's cousins after a thousand years?"

"Take one step at a time," Keff said. "Tell them who you are, where you're coming from, and ask permission to land. Mention us as your friends and allies. We don't want to have to explain anything more complicated than that at these long-distance rates. I'll stand behind you so they can see me. We'll answer their other questions when we arrive."

Following Keff's instructions, Tall Eyebrow made a brief translation. Carialle could see on close magnification that the small green male's hands were trembling, but his signing was perfectly clear and precise as he identified himself. The long part, the explanation of his people's long absence from Cridi, he alluded to with some quick symbols and a few chirps, mentioning Keff and Carialle as their rescuers and allies. At the end, he asked for instructions.

"Good, TE, good," Keff said soothingly, patting the globe-frog on the shoulder as soon as the camera went off. Tall Eyebrow's shoulders collapsed inward with relief. His two companions crowded in to comfort him.

"It is difficult," he signed.

"Good job. It's going to be a big day for you," Carialle said, signing through her globe-frog image. "That was just fine."

"And now, what?" Tall Eyebrow asked, stepping out into the air from Keff's chair, which was a meter too high for him.

"And now, we wait," Keff said, reclaiming his seat and throwing himself back with his hands behind his head. "Remember, they said, 'halt and not-proceed.' In the meantime you can sing me the symbols for each number, sign, and modifier."

They didn't have long to wait. Within a few hours, Carialle picked up a new transmission from the beacon. A harried-looking frog, not the silver-torqued one, appeared with a new message, which consisted of a single, short trill, and the screen went blank.

"What was that?" Carialle asked, replaying the transmission. "Welcome? Go away?"

Tall Eyebrow's hands flew. "It means 'proceed to the second planet from the sun, listen on this frequency for beacon, and follow in great-circle, equatorial orbit for landing procedure.' It would seem procedure does not change."

"That little ding-a-lingle meant all that?" Keff laughed.

"No stranger than the 'beep-a, beep-a'," Carialle imitated the communication-line busy signal, "which means, 'the party to whom you wished to speak is engaged on the line. Please disconnect and try again later.'"

"True," Keff said, his eyebrows raised in amusement.

"It is an abbreviation," TE acknowledged. "Such a sign is phonetically recorded in our archives. I am surprised to hear that it really does sound like it is written."

"It's a pity you didn't continue the use of your verbal language on Ozran," Carialle said. "Humans are geared toward spoken dialects. The mages might have realized sooner that you were sentient."

"Things might have gone faster with us, too," Keff agreed. "My IT program is geared more toward aural reception and translation."

"Yet inside our globes," Tall Eyebrow said gravely, "no one could have heard us cry out."

The second planet from the sun, behind a scorched clay rock and an insignificant asteroid belt where an unstable planet used to be, was large and beautiful and wet. As she swept into orbit above the equator, Carialle read her spectroanalysis monitors and discovered high relative humidity, due to a respectably thick and variable cloud cover in a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere.

"I'll have mold galore, and possibly rust in my drawers when I lift off."