What, My rings? You are surprised? You expected greater solidarity from your vaunted Commons? More loyalty?

Then live and learn, My waxy pretties. This is just the beginning.

i^arl TEARS COVERED THE CHEEKS OF THE AGED HUMAN sage as he ran through the forest. "It's my fault. . . ." he murmured between gasping breaths. "All my fault,. . . I never should've allowed it ... so near the poor g'Kek. ..."

Lark heard Cambel's lament as they joined a stampede of refugees, swarming down narrow aisles between colossal shafts of boo. He had to catch Lester when the sage stumbled in grief over what they all had witnessed, only duras ago. Lark caught the eye of a hoonish militiaman with a huge sword slung down his back. The burly warrior swept Lester into his arms, gently hauling the stricken sage to safety.

For those fleeing beneath the boo, that word-safety- might never be the same. For two thousand years, the ramparts of Dooden Mesa offered protection to the oldest and weakest sooner race. Yet no defense could stand against the sky cruiser that swept over that sheltered valley, too soon after Lark's shouted warning. Some refugees-those with enough nerve to glance back-would always carry the image of that awful ship, hovering like a predator over the graceful ramps, homes, and workshops.

It must have been drawn by the Buyur computer-by its "digital resonance."

Once over the mountain, the aliens could not help noticing the g'Kek settlement in the valley below.

". . . we were too near the poor g'Kek ..."

Driven by a need for answers-and a lifelong curiosity about all things Galactic-Cambel had allowed Ling and Rann to drive the machine at full force, deciphering the mystery records. It was like waving a lure above this part of the Rimmers, calling down an ill wind.

Some of those running through the forest seemed less panicky. Fierce-eyed Jeni Shen kept herd on her militia team, so Rann and Ling never had a chance to dodge left or right, slipping away through the boo. As if either Danik had any place to go. Their faces looked as dismayed as anybody's.

Lark's ears still rang from when the Jophur ship cast beams of aching brilliance, tearing apart the frail canopy of blur cloth, laying Dooden Mesa bare under a cruel sun. Teeming wheeled figures scurried futilely, like a colony of hive mites in a collapsed den.

The beams stopped, and something even more dreadful fell from the floating nemesis.

A golden haze. A flood of liquid light.

Lark's nerve had failed him at that point, as he, too, plunged into the boo, fleeing a disaster he had helped wreak.

You aren 't alone, Lester. You have company in h.e.l.l.

Dwer MUDFOOT SEEMED CRAZIER THAN EVER. Blinking past a cloud of buzzing gnats, Dwer watched the mad noor crouch over some helpless creature he had caught near the sh.o.r.e, gripping his prey in both forepaws, brandishing sharp teeth toward whatever doomed beast had unluckily strayed within reach. Mudfoot showed no interest in two sooty s.p.a.ceships that lay crippled, just beyond the dune.

Why should he care? Dwer thought. Any Galactics who glimpse him will just shrug of,another critter of Jijo. Enjoy your meal, Mudfoot. No squatting under hot sand for you!

Dwer's hidey-hole was intensely uncomfortable. His legs felt cramped and grit eagerly sought every body crevice, Partial shade was offered by his tunic, propped up with two arrows and covered with sand. But he had to share that narrow shelter with Rety-an uncomfortable fit, to say the least. Worse, there was a kind of midge, no larger than a speck, that seemed to find human breath irresistible. One by one, the insectoids drifted upslope to the makeshift cavity where Dwer and Rety exposed their faces for air. The bugs fluttered toward their mouths, inevitably being drawn inside. Rety coughed, spat, and cursed in her Gray Hills dialect, despite Dwer's pleas for silence.

She's not trained for this, he thought, trying for patience, During his apprenticeship, Master Fallen used to leave him in a hunting blind for days on end, then sneak back to i observe. For each sound Dwer made, Fallen added another midura, till Dwer learned the value of quiet.

"I wish he'd quit playin' with his food," Rety muttered, glaring downslope at Mudfoot. "Or else, bring some up for us."

Dwer's belly growled agreement. But he told her, "Don't think about it. Try to sleep. We'll see about sneaking away come nightfall."

For once, she seemed willing to take his advice. Sometimes, Rety seemed at her best when things were at their worst.

At this rate, she'll be a saint before it's all over. He glanced left, toward the swamp. Both alien ships lay grounded in a seaside bog, just two arrowflights away. It made the two humans easy targets if they budged. Nor had he any guarantee this would change at night.

I hear tell that star G.o.ds have lenses that pick out a warm body moving in the dark, and other kinds to track metal and tools.

Getting away from here might not be easy, or even possible.

There wasn't much to say for the alternatives. It would have been one thing to surrender to Kunn. As a Danik adoptee, Rety might have swayed the human star pilot to spare Dwer's life. Perhaps.

But the newcomers who shot down Kunn's little scout . . . Dwer felt his hackles rise watching tapered stacks of glistening doughnuts inspect their damaged ship, accompanied by hovering robots.

Why be afraid? They look like traeki, and traeki are harmless, right?

Not when they come swooping from s.p.a.ce, throwing lightning.

Dwer wished he had listened more closely to holy services as a child, instead of fidgeting when the Sacred Scrolls were read. Some excerpts had been inserted by the ringed ones, when their sneakship came-pa.s.sages of warning. Not all stacks of fatty rings were friendly, it seemed. What was the name they used? Dwer tried to recall what word stood for a traeki that was no traeki, but he came up blank.

Sometimes he wished he could be more like his brother and sister-able to think deep thoughts, with vast stores of book learning to call upon. Lark or Sara would surely make better use of this time of forced inaction. They would be weighing alternatives, listing possibilities, formulating some plan.

But all I do is doze, thinking about food. Wishing I had some way to scratch.

He wasn't yet desperate enough to walk toward that silver ship with hands raised. Anyway, the aliens and their helpers were still fussing over the smoke-stained hull, making repairs.

As he nodded in a drowsy torpor, he fought down one itch in particular, a p.r.i.c.kly sensation inside his head. The feeling had grown ever since he first gave the Danik robot a "ride" across a river, using his body to anchor its groundhugging fields. Each time he collapsed on the opposite bank, waking up had felt like rising from a pit. The effect grew stronger with every crossing.

At least I won't have to do that again. The robot now cowered under a nearby dune, useless and impotent since Kunn's ship was downed and its master taken.

Dwer's sleep was uneasy, disturbed first by a litany of aching twinges, and later by disturbing dreams.

He had always dreamed. As a child, Dwer used to jerk upright in the dark, screaming till the entire household roused, from Nelo and Melina down to the lowest chimp and manservant, gathering round to comfort him back to sweet silence. He had no clear memory of what nightmares used to terrify him so, but Dwer still had sleep visions of startling vividness and clarity.

Never worth screaming over, though.

Unless you count One-of-a-Kind.

He recalled the old mule spider of the acid mountain lake, who spoke words directly in his mind one fateful day, during his first solo scouting trip over the Rimmer Range.

the mad spider, unlike any other, who tried all kinds of deceit to charm Dwer into its web, there to join its "collection."

the same spider who nearly caught Dwer that awful night when Rety and her "bird" were trapped in its maze of bitter vines . . . before that vine network exploded in a mortal inferno.

Restlessly, he envisioned living cables, the spider's own body, snaking across a tangled labyrinth, creeping ever nearer, closing an unstoppable snare. From each twisting rope there dripped heavy caustic vapors, or liquors that would freeze your skin numb on contact.

Around Dwer, the sand burrow felt like a ropy spiral of nooses, drawing tight a snug embrace that was both cloying and loving, in a sick-sweet way.

No one else could ever appreciate you as much as I do, crooned the serenely patient call of One-of-a-Kind. We share a destiny, my precious, my treasure.

Dwer felt trapped, more by a languor of sleep than by the enveloping sand. He mumbled.

"Yer just . . . my . . . 'magination. . . ." A crooning, dreamlike laugh, and the mellifluous voice rejoined- So you always used to claim, though you cautiously evaded my grasp, nonetheless. Until the night I almost had you.

"The night you died!" Dwer answered. The words were a mere rolling of his exhaled breath.

True. But do you honestly think that was an ending? My kind is very old. I myself bad lived half a million years, slowly etching and leaching the hard leavings of the Buyur. Across those ages, thinking long thoughts, would I not learn everything there is to know about mortality?

Dwer realized-all those times he helped the Danik robot cross a stream, conducting its throbbing fields, somehow must have changed him inside. Sensitized him. Or else driven him mad. Either way, it explained this awful dream.

His eyes opened a crack as he tried to waken, but fatigue lay over Dwer like a shroud, and all he managed was to peer through interleaved eyelashes at the swamp below.

Till now, he had always stared at the two alien ships- the larger shaped like a silvery cigar, and the smaller like a bronze arrowhead. But now Dwer regarded the background. The swamp itself, and not the shiny intruders.

They are just dross, my precious. Ignore those pa.s.sing bits of "made stuff," the brief fancies of ephemeral beings. The planet will absorb them, with some patient help from my kindred.

Distracted by the ships, he had missed the telltale signs. A nearby squarish mound whose symmetry was almost hidden by rank vegetation. A series of depressions, like grooves filled with algae sc.u.m, always the same distance apart, one after another, extending into the distance.

It was an ancient Buyur site, of course. Perhaps a port or seaside resort, long ago demolished, with the remnants left for wind and rain to dissolve.

Aided by a wounded planet's friend, came the voice, with renewed pride.

We who help erase the scars.

We who expedite time's rub.

Over there. Between the shadows of his own eyelashes, Dwer made out slender shapes amid the marsh plants, like threads woven among the roots and fronds, snaking through the muddy shallows. Long, tubelike outlines, whose movement was glacially slow. But he could track the changes, with patience.

Oh, what patience you might have learned, if only you joined me! We would be one with Time now, my pet, my rare one.

It wasn't just his growing vexation with the irksome dream voice-that he knew to be imagined, after all. Dawning realization finally lent Dwer the will to shake off sleep. He squeezed his eyelids shut hard enough to bring tears and flush away the stickiness. Alert now, he reopened them and stared again at the faint twisty patterns in the water. They were real.

"It's a mule swamp," he muttered. "And it still lives."

Rety stirred, commenting testily.

"So? One more reason to get out of this crakky place."

But Dwer smiled. Emerging from the fretful nap, he found his thoughts now taking a sharp turn, veering away from a victim's apprehension.

In the distance, he still heard the noor beast bark and growl while toying with his prey-a carnivore's privilege under nature's law. Before, Mudfoot's behavior had irritated Dwer. But now he took it as an omen.

All his setbacks and injuries-and simple common sense-seemed to, demand that he flee this deadly place, crawling on his belly, taking Rety with him to whatever hideout they could find in a deadly world.

But one idea had now crystallized, as clear as the nearby waters of the Rift. I'm not running away, he decided. I don't really know how to do that.

A hunter-that was what he had been born and trained to be.

Alvin ALL RIGHT, SO THERE WE WERE, WATCHING FARAWAY events through the phuvnthus' magical viewer, when the camera eye suddenly went jerky and we found ourselves staring into the grinning jaws of a giant noor! Hugely magnified, it was the vista a fen mouse might see-its last sight on its way to being a midday snack.

Huphu reacted with a sharp hiss. Her claws dug in my shoulder.

The spinning voice, our host, seemed as surprised as we. That whirling hologram-thing twisted like the neck of a confused urs, nodding as if it were consulting someone out of sight. I caught murmurs that might be hurried Anglic and GalSeven.

When the voice next spoke aloud, we heard the words twice, the second time delayed as it came back through the drone's tiny pickups. The voice used accented GalSix, and talked to the strange noor. Three words, so high-pitched I barely understood.

"Brother, " the voice urged quickly. "Please stop."

And the strange noor did stop, turning its head to examine the drone from one side to the other.

True, we hoons employ noor beasts as helpers on our boats, and those learn many words and simple commands. But that is on the Slope, where they get sour b.a.l.l.s and sweet umbles as pay. How would a noor living east of the Rimmers learn Galactic Six?

The voice tried again, changing pitch and timbre, almost at the limit of my hearing range.

"Brother, will you speak to us, in the name of the Trickster?"

Huck and I shared an amazed glance. What was the voice trying to accomplish?

One of those half memories came back to me, from when our ill-fated Wuphon's Dream crashed into the openmawed phuvnthus whale ship. Me and my friends were thrown gasping across a metal deck, and soon after I stared through agonized haze as six-legged monsters tromped about, smashing our homemade instruments underfoot, waving lantern beams, exclaiming in a ratchety language I didn't understand. The armored beings seemed cruel when they blasted poor little Ziz, the five-stack traeki. Then they appeared crazy upon spying Huphu. I recall them bending metal legs to crouch before my pet, buzzing and popping, as if trying to get her to speak.

And now here was more of the same! Did the voice hope to talk a wild noor into releasing the remote-controlled drone? Huck winked at me with two waving g'Kek eyes, a semaph.o.r.e of amused contempt. Star G.o.ds or no, our hosts seemed prize fools to expect easy cooperation from a noor.

So we were more surprised than anyone-even Pincer and Ur-ronn-when the on-screen figure snapped its jaws, frowning in concentration. Then, through gritted teeth came a raspy squeak . , . answering in the same informal tongue.

"In th' nam o' th' Trickst'er . . . who th' h.e.l.l'r you.'!"

My healing spine crackled painfully as I straightened, venting an umble of astonishment. Huck sighed and Pincer's visor whirled faster than the agitated hologram. Only Huphu seemed oblivious. She licked herself complacently, as if she had not heard a blessed thing.

"What do you jeekee, Ifni-slucking t.u.r.ds think you're doing!" Huck wailed. All four eyes tossed in agitation, showing she wa&more angry than afraid. Two hulking, sixlegged phuvnthus escorted her, one on each side, carrying her by the rims of her wheels.

The rest of us were more cooperative, though reluctant. Pincer had to tilt his red chitin sh.e.l.l in order to pa.s.s through some doorways, following as a pair of little amphibian creatures led us back to the whale ship that brought us to this underwater sanctuary. Ur-ronn trotted behind Pincer, her long neck folded low to the ground, a pose of simmering dejection.

I hobbled on crutches behind Huck, staying out of reach of her pusher leg, which flailed and banged against corridor walls on either side.

"You promised to explain everything!" she cried out. "You said we'd get to ask questions of the Library!"

Neither the phuvnthus nor the amphibians answered, but I recalled what the spinning voice had said before sending us away.

"We cannot justify any longer keeping four children under conditions that put you all in danger. This location may be bombed again, with greater fury. Also, you now know much too much for your own good."

"What do we know?" Pincer had asked, in perplexity. "That noors can talk-alk-alk?"

The hologram a.s.sented with a twisting nod. "And other things. We can't keep you here, or send you home as we originally intended, since that might prove disastrous for ourselves and your families. Hence our decision to convey you to another place. A goal mentioned in your diaries, where you may be content for the necessary time."

"Wait!" Huck had insisted. "I'll bet you're not even in charge. You're prob'ly just a computer ... a thing. I want to talk to someone else! Let us see your boss!"

I swear, the whirling pattern seemed both surprised and amused.

"Such astute young people. We had to revise many a.s.sumptions since meeting the four of you. As I am programmed to find incongruity pleasant, let me thank you for the experience, and sincerely wish you well."

I noticed, the voice never answered Huck's question.

Typical grown-up, I thought. Whether hoonish parents or alien contraptions . . . they're all basically the same.

Huck settled down once we left the curved hallway and reentered the maze of reclaimed pa.s.sages leading to the whale ship. The phuvnthus let her down, and she rolled along with the rest of us. My friend continued grumbling remarks about the phuvnthus' physiology, habits, and ancestry, but I saw through her pose. Huck had that smug set to her eyestalks.

Clearly, she felt she had accomplished something sneaky and smart.

Once aboard the whale ship, we were given another room with a porthole. Apparently the phuvnthus weren't worried about us memorizing landmarks. That worried me, at first.