"We therefore offer . . . present . . .

deign to honor you With an invitation ... a blessing . . .

a chance to earn the boon of representation.

Zooooooon.

"It is an honor . . . beneficence . . .

glory to be chosenTo seek out . . . penetrate . . .

create the future of your race.

Zoon!"

There it finished as abruptly as it had begun.

"Bow again!" Gailet urged in a whisper. He bent over with arms crossed, as she demonstrated. When Fiben looked up again, the small crowd of alien avians had swiveled and moved toward the doorway. The perch was lowered, but still the tall Gubru had to duck down, feathered arms splayed apart for balance, in order to pa.s.s through. Irongrip followed behind. The Probationer's parting glare at them was one of pure loathing.

Fiben's head rang. He had given up trying to follow the bird's queer, formal dialect of Galactic Three after the first phrase. Even the Anglic translation had been well nigh impossible to understand.

The sharp lighting faded as the procession moved away down the hallway in a babble of clucking gabble. In the remaining dimness, Fiben and Gailet turned and looked at each other.

"Now who th' h.e.l.l was that?" he asked.

Gailet frowned. "It was a Suzerain. One of their three leaders. If I'm not wrong-and I could easily be-it was the Suzerain of Propriety."

"That tells me a whole lot. Just what on Ifni's roulette wheel is a Suzerain of Propriety?"

Gailet waved away his question. Her forehead was knotted in deep concentration. "Why did it come to us, instead of having us brought to it?" she wondered aloud, though obviously she wasn't soliciting his opinion. "And why meet us at night? Did you notice it didn't even stay to hear if we accepted its offer? It probably felt compelled, by propriety, to make it in person. But its aides can get our answer later."

"Answer to what? What offer? Gailet, I couldn't even follow-"

But she made a nervous waving motion with both hands. "Not now. I've got to think, Fiben. Give me a few minutes." She walked back to the wall and sat-down^on the straw facing the blank stone. Fiben had a suspicion it would be considerably longer than she'd estimated before she was done.

You sure can choose 'em, he thought. You deserve what you get when you fall in love with a genius....

He blinked. Shook his head. Say what?

But movement in the hall distracted him from pursuing his own unexpected thought. A solitary chim entered, carrying an armload of straw and folded bolts of dark brown cloth. The load hid the short neochimp's face. Only when she lowered it to the ground did Fiben see that it was the chimmie who had stared at him earlier, the one who seemed so strangely familiar.

"I brought you some fresh straw, and some more blankets. These nights are still pretty cool."

He nodded. "Thank you."

She did not meet his eyes. She turned and walked back toward the door, moving with a lithe grace that was obvious, even under the billowing zipsuit. "Wait!" he said suddenly.

She stopped, still facing the door. Fiben walked toward her as far as the heavy chains would allow. "What's your name?" he asked softly, not wanting to disturb Gailet in her corner.

Her shoulders were hunched. She still faced away from him. "I'm ..." Her voice was very low. "S-some people call me Sylvie. ..."

Even in swirling quickly through the doorway she moved like a dancer. There was a rattle of keys, and hurried footsteps could be heard receding down the hall outside.

Fiben stared at the blank door. "Well, I'll be a monkey's grandson."

He turned around and walked back to the wall where Gailet sat, muttering to herself, and leaned over to drape a blanket upon her shoulders. Then he returned to his own corner to collapse into a heap of sweet-smelling straw.

55 Uthacalthing Sc.u.mmy algae foamed in the shallows where a few small, stilt-legged native birds picked desultorily for insects. Bushy plants lay in clumps, outlining the surrounding steppes.

Footprints led from the banks of the small lake up into the nearby scrub-covered hillside. Just glancing at the muddy tracks, Uthacalthing could tell that the walker had stepped with a pigeon-toed gait. It seemed to use a three-legged stance.

He looked up quickly as a flash of blue caught the corner of his eye-the same glimmer that had led him to this place. He tried to focus on the faint twinkle, hut it was gone before he could track it.

He knelt to examine the impressions in the mud. A smile spread as he measured them with his hands. Such beautiful outlines! The third foot was off center from the other two and its print was much smaller than the others, almost as if some bipedal creature had crossed from lake to brush leaning on a blunt-headed staff.

Uthacalthing picked up a fallen branch, but he hesitated before brushing away the outlines.

Shall I leave them? he wondered. Is it really necessary to hide them?He shook his head.

No. As the humans say, do not change game plans in midstream.

The footprints disappeared as he swept the branch back and forth. Just as he was finishing, he heard heavy footsteps and the sound of breaking shrubs behind him. He turned as Kault rounded a bend in the narrow game trail to the small prairie lake. The glyph, lurrunanu, hovered and darted over the Thennanin's big, crested head like some frustrated parasitic insect, buzzing about in search of a soft spot that never seemed to be there.

Uthacalthing's corona ached like an overused muscle. He let lurrunanu bounce against Kault's bluff stolidity for a minute longer before admitting defeat. He drew the defeated glyph back in and dropped the branch to the ground.

The Thennanin wasn't looking at the terrain anyway. His concentration was on a small instrument resting in his broad palm. "I am growing suspicious, my friend," Kault said as he drew even with the Tymbrimi.

Uthacalthing felt blood rush in the arteries at the back of his neck. At last? he wondered.

"Suspicious of what, my colleague?"

Kault folded an instrument and put it away in one of his many vest pouches. "There are signs ..." His crest flapped. "I have been listening to the uncoded transmissions of the Gubru, and something odd seems to be going on."

Uthacalthing sighed. No, Kault's one-track mind was concentrating on a completely different subject. There was no use trying to draw him away from it with subtle clues.

"What are the invaders up to now?" he asked.

"Well, first of all, I am picking up much less excited military traffic. Suddenly they appear to be engaged in fewer of those small-scale fights up in the mountains than they were days and weeks ago. You'll recall we were both wondering why they were expending so much effort to suppress what had to be a rather tiny partisan resistance."

Actually, Uthacalthing had been pretty certain he knew the reason for the frantic flurry of activity on the part of the Gubru. From what the two of them had been able to piece together, it seemed the invaders were very anxious to find something up in the Mountains of Mulun. They had thrown soldiers and scientists into the rough range with apparent reckless energy, and appeared to have paid a heavy cost for the effort.

"Can you think of a reason why the fighting has ebbed?" he asked Kault.

"I am uncertain from what I can decipher. One possibility is that the Gubru have found and captured the thing they were so desperately looking for-"

Doubtful, Uthacalthing thought with conviction. It is hard to cage a ghost.

"Or they may have given up searching for it-"

More likely, Uthacalthing agreed. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the avians should realize they had been made fools of, and cease chasing wild gooses.

"Or, perhaps," Kault concluded, "the Gubru have simply finished suppressing all opposition and liquidated whoever was opposing them."

Uthacalthing prayed the last answer was not the correct one. It was among the risks he had taken, of course, in arranging to tease the enemy into such a frenzy. He could only hope that his daughter and Megan Oneagle's son had not paid the ultimate price to further his own convoluted hoax on the malign birds.

"Hmm," he commented. "Did you say there was something else puzzling you?"

"This," Kault went on. "That after five twelves of planetary days, during which they have done nothing at all for the benefit of this world, suddenly the Gubru are making announcements, offering amnesty and employment to former members of the Ecological Recovery Service."

"Yes? Well, maybe it just means they've completed their consolidation and can now spare a little attention to their responsibilties."

Kault snorted. "Perhaps. But the Gubru are accountants. Credit counters. Humorless, selfish worriers. They are fanatically prim about those aspects of Galactic tradition that interest them, yet they hardly seem to care at all about preserving planets as nursery worlds, only about the near-term status of their clan."

Although Uthacalthing agreed with that a.s.sessment, he considered Kault less than an,impartial observer. And the Thennanin was hardly the one to accuse others of being humorless.

Anyway, one thing was obvious. So long as Kault was distracted like this, thinking about the Gubru, it would be useless to try to draw his attention to subtle clues and footprints in the ground.

He could sense movement in the prairie all around him. The little carnivores and their prey were all seeking cover, settling into small niches and burrows to wait out midday, when the fierce heat of summer would beat down and it would cost too much energy either to give chase or to flee. In that respect, tall Galactics were no exception. "Come," Uthacalthing said. "The sun is high. We must find a shady place to rest. I see some trees over on the other side of the water."

Kault followed without comment. He appeared to be indifferent about minor deviations in their path, so long as the distant mountains grew perceptibly closer each day. The white-topped peaks were now more than just a faint line against the horizon. It might take weeks to reach them, and indeterminably longer to find a way through unknown pa.s.ses to the Sind. But Thennanin were patient when it suited their purposes.

There were no blue glimmerings as Uthacalthing found them shelter under a too-tight cl.u.s.ter of stunted trees, though he kept his eye "peeled" anyway. Still, with his corona he thought he kenned a touch of feral joy from some mind hiding out there on the steppe, something large, clever, and familiar.

"I am, indeed, considered to be something of an expert on Terrans," Kault said a little later as they made conversation under the gnarled branches. Small insects buzzed near the Thennanin's breathing slits, only to be blown away every time they approached. "That, plus my ecological expertise, won me my a.s.signment to this planet."

"Don't forget your sense of humor," Uthacalthing added, with a smile.

"Yes," Kault's crest puffed in the Thennanin equivalent of a nod. "At home I was thought quite the devil. Just the sort to deal with wolflings and Tymbrimi pixies." He finished with a rapid, low set of raspy breaths. It was obviously a conscious affectation, for Thennanin did not have a laughter reflex as such. No matter, Uthacalthing thought. As Thennanin humor goes, it was pretty good.

"Have you had much first-hand experience with Earth-lings?"

"Oh, yes," Kault said. "I have been to Earth. I have had the delight of walking her rain forests and seeing the strange, diverse lifeforms there. I have met neo-dolphins and whales. While my people believe humans themselves should never have been declared fully uplifted-they would profit much from a few more millennia of polishing under proper guidance-can admit that their world is beautiful and their clients promising."

One reason the Thennanin were in this current war was in hopes of picking up all three Earthling species for their clan by forced adoption-"for the Terrans' own good," of course. Though, to be fair, it was also clear that there were disagreements over this among the Thennanin themselves. Kault's party, for instance, preferred a ten-thousand-year campaign of persuasion, to try to win the Earthlings over to adoption voluntarily, with "love."

Obviously, Kault's party did not dominate the present government.

"And of course, I met a few Earthlings in the course of a term working for the Galactic Inst.i.tute of Migration, during an expedition to negotiate with the Fah'fah'n*fah."

Uthacalthing's corona erupted in a whirl of silvery tendrils, an open show of surprise. He knew his stunned expression was readable even to Kault, and did not care. "You . . . you have been to meet the hydrogen breathers?" He did not even know the trick of p.r.o.nouncing the hyper-alien name, not part of any sanctioned Galactic tongue.

Kault had surprised him once again!

"The Fah'fah'n*fah." Again Kault's breathing slits pulsed in mimicry of laughter. This time, it sounded much more realistic. "The negotiations were held in the Poul-Kren sub-quadrant, not far from what the Earthlings call the Orion sector."

"That's very close to Terra's Canaan colonies."

"Yes. That is one reason why they were invited to take part. Even though these infrequent meetings between the civilizations of oxygen breathers and hydrogen breathers are among the most critical and delicate in any era, it was thought appropriate to bring a few Terrans along, to show them some of the subtleties of high-level diplomacy."

It must have been his state of confused surprise, but at that moment Uthacalthing thought he actually caught a kenning from Kault ... a trace of something deep and troubling to the Thennanin. He is not telling me all of it, Uthacalthing realized. There were other reasons Earthlings were involved.

For billions of years, uneasy peace had been maintained between two parallel, completely separate cultures. It was almost as if the Five Galaxies were actually Ten, for there were at least as many stable worlds with hydrogen atmospheres as planets like Garth and Earth and Tymbrim. The two strands of life, each supporting vast numbers of species and lifeforms, had almost nothing in common. The Fah'fah'n*fah wanted nothing of rock, and their worlds were too vast and cold and heavy for the Galactics ever to covet.

Also, they seemed even to operate on different levels or rates of time. The hydrogen breathers preferred the slow routes, through D-Level hypers.p.a.ce and even normal s.p.a.ce between the stars-the realm where relativity ruled-leaving the quicker lanes among the stars to the fast-living heirs of the fabled Progenitors. ^ Sometimes there were conflicts. Entire systems and clans died. There were no rules to such wars.

Sometimes there was trade, metals for gases, or machinery in exchange for strange things not found even in the records of the Great Library.

There were periods when whole spiral arms would be abandoned by one civilization or the other. The Galactic Inst.i.tute of Migration organized these huge movements for the oxygen breathers, every hundred million years or so. The official reason was to allow great tracts of stars to "go fallow" for an era, to give their planets time to develop new pre-sentient life. Still, the other purpose was widely known . . . to put s.p.a.ce between hydrogen and oxygen life where it seemed impossible to ignore each other any longer.

And now Kault was telling him that there had been a recent negotiation right in the Poul-Kren sector? And humans had been there?

Why have I never heard of this before? he wondered.

He wanted to follow this thread, but had no opportunity. Kault was obviously unwilling to pursue it, and returned to the earlier topic of conversation.

"I still believe there is something anomalous about the Gubru transmissions, Uthacalthing. From their broadcasts itis clear that they are combing both Port Helenia and theislands, seeking out the Earthlings' ecology and uplift experts."

Uthacalthing decided that his curiosity could wait-a hard decision for a Tymbrimi. "Well, as I suggested earlier, perhaps the Gubru have decided to do their duty by Garth, at last."

Kault gurgled in a tone Uthacalthing knew denoted doubt. "Even if that were so, they would require ecologists, but why Uplift specialists? I intuit that something curious is still going on," Kault concluded. "The Gubru have been extremely agitated for several megaseconds."

Even without their small receiver, or any news over the airwaves at all, Uthacalthing would still have known that much. It was implicit in the intermittent blue light he had been following since weeks ago. The flickering glow meant that the Tymbrimi Diplomatic Cache had to have been breached. The bait he had left inside the cairn, along with numerous other hints and clues, could only lead a sapient being to one conclusion.

It was apparent his jest on the Gubru had proved very expensive for them.

Still, all good things come to an end. By now even the Gubru must have figured out that it was all just a Tymbrimi trick. The avians weren't exactly stupid. They had to discover sooner or later that there really weren't any such things as "Garthlings."

The sages say that it can be a mistake to push a joke too far. Am I making that error trying to pull the same jest on Kault?

Ah, but in this case the procedure was so totally different! Fooling Kault was turning into a much slower, more difficult, more personal task.

Anyway, what else have I to do, to pa.s.s the time?

"Do tell me more about your suspicions," Uthacalthing said aloud to his companion. "I am very, very interested."

56 Galactics Against all expectation, the new Suzerain of Cost and Caution was actually scoring points. Its plumage had barely even begun to show the royal hues of candidacy, and it had started out far, far behind its peers in the compet.i.tion. Nevertheless, when it danced the other Suzerains were forced to watch closely and pay heed to its well-pa.r.s.ed arguments.

"This effort was misguided, costly, unwise," it chirpedand whirled in delicate rhythm. "We have spent treasure,time, and honor seeking, chasing, hunting achimera!"

The new chief bureaucrat did have a few advantages. It had been trained by its predecessor-the impressive deceased Suzerain of Cost and Caution. Also, to this conclave it had brought an equally impressive, indicting array of facts. Data cubes lay scattered across the floor. The presentation by the head civil servant had, in fact, been quite devastating.

"There is no way, no possibility, no chance that thisworld could have hidden upon it a presentient survivor ofthe Bururalli! It was a hoax, a ruse, a fiendish wolfling-and-Tymbrimi plot to get us to waste, squander, throw away our wealth!"

To the Suzerain of Propriety this was most humiliating. In fact, it was not much short of catastrophic.

During the hiatus, while a new bureaucratic candidate was being chosen, the priest and the admiral had reigned supreme, with no one to hold them in check. They had well known that it was not wise to act so, without the voice of a third peer to restrain them, but what being always acted wisely when opportunity beckoned seductively?

The admiral had gone on personal search and destroy missions in pursuit of the mountain partisans, seeking gloss to add to its personal honor. For its part, the priest had ordered expensive new works built and had rushed the delivery of a new planetary Branch Library.