They had one great advantage, from the exiles' point of view; they did not need to be taken back to the ship for processing. Straight out of the ground they could be digested by even the youngest child.

The fourth winter was difficult, but n.o.body died of starvation; by the time of the fourth warm season, the exiles had four children among them, one of them a boy. It was a remarkable number, for a community of less than four thousand; at this rate, their numbers woulddouble within a mere ten or twelve centuries.

In the fifth year, guided by the information stored in their corders, the small colony of exiles at last began to flourish. After several years of trial and error, the engineers started turning out decent steel at a good clip; it was the catalyst that drove everything else. Farming grew easier, as plows came into use; shovels and picks made it possible to dig channels to divert water from the distant river to the fields, where it was needed, rather than relying upon the rains to water the crops. The colony's original crude buildings, some no better than mud-thatched huts, were torn down, one by one, and replaced with st.u.r.dy buildings with thick log walls.

Dvan noticed about that time that in conversation he had begun referring to the town as the "colony." It was a shift in perception that many of the Shield shared. With food at last a.s.sured, without the Aneda to guide their breeding, the colony saw an explosion of children that amazed and disturbed the Shield. In the sixth year, eight children were born; in the seventh, better thantwenty. There was something flatly indecent about it, many of the Shield felt, and Dvan understood the feeling; animals bred so, not the Flame People.

One evening, over dinner, the Sentinel Marah said, in response to a comment from Dvan on the subject, "What makes you think them People of the Flame?"

It stopped all conversation around the firepit. Shield watched Dvan, listened to see how he would respond.

"They are heretics, surely. But they are nonetheless our people."

Marah shook his head slowly. "I do not think so, Dvan. Listen, I have thought long on this. Their Dancers do not Dance; they have no Keeper to maintain the Flame were it brought down among them; lacking a Keeper, their children likewise lack the most basic of religious instruction. Oh, they're human, aye; but Flame People? No more so than any of the other Splinter races were."

The tenth year pa.s.sed peacefully, without news from the World. Though recall was mentioned occasionally, in conversation among the Shield, it was rare; Dvan, for one, did not think much about it at all. Among a people who did not age, ten years was no very long time at all.

The Dancer Sedon pa.s.sed his hundredth birthday, in World years, during the warm season of the tenth year, local time. It was an odd confluence of calendars; the colonists had grown in the habit of counting years by local time. Among the Dancers of the World, a Dancer's hundredth year was a time of solemn ceremony, a time when a Dancer's accomplishments were reviewed, and the Dancer's Consecration, his service to the Flame, was sworn once again.

Sedon, leader of the rebellion, was the youngest of the Dancers to choose exile over suicide. All the others had pa.s.sed by this milestone decades, or centuries, or, in the case of the ancient Dancer Indo, millennia prior. Dvan had wondered, briefly, how Sedon would observe the occasion; and then the time came, and he did not have to wonder.

Theycelebrated .

A dozen of the Shield stood duty, in case of trouble, in a long line in front of the ship, watching the high flames leap up from the huge fires the exiles had set.

Dvan stood in the cool darkness and watched the party.

The ship loomed high above his head; though he could not see it from where he stood, he was aware of it behind him, the vast bulk of giant sphere pressed deeply down into the earth.

He wore the kitjan at his belt, as always; his bare legs p.r.i.c.kled slightly in the gusting wind.

It was the second night in a row the exiles had celebrated. They sang and danced together, arms linked, shuffling around the huge fires in what was, Dvan suspected, unconscious imitation of one of the World's Temple ceremonies. Even some of the breeders had joined in with them, arms linked with the men. The first night, Dvan had not been certain whether any of the eight Dancers were present; after the women joined in the shuffling step around the fire, he knew they were not.

No Dancer, no matter how debased, would have tolerated such a thing from a breeder.

The children played around the fires while their elders drank and sang and danced.

The children fascinated Dvan.

They were as unlike the children of the World as Dancer and Keeper. Loud, p.r.o.ne to quick laughter, both the boys and girls seemed somehow more vigorous, more full of energy, than what Dvan recalled from his own childhood. They played harder, and longer; and when' injured, which happened frequently in this untamed wilderness, it seemed to Dvan that they healed very quickly.

They grew withamazing speed.

He thought in local time, a habit he had given up fighting. A child of eight or nine, raised here, looked to Dvan's eye halfway through the childhood of its body. The other children, at five and six years, were as large as any ten-year-old of the World. Dvan had not been fully grown until well after his thirtieth birthday; he thought that these children, if they continued to grow at the same rate, would reach physical adulthood by their twentieth birthdays, or perhaps even earlier.

In the woods off to Dvan's right, a form glowed in faint infrared. Dvan turned slightly to watch it; it came forward, out of the cover of the trees, and approached Dvan across the cleared fields. Dvan knew it for a Dancer instantly; no one else moved like that. As it grew closer, starlight upon its features, and the flicker of the fires, gave it the shape of the Dancer Sedon in a scarlet robe.

"Dvan."

"Sedon. What brings you out on this night?"

Sedon shrugged, stood motionless a half dozen paces away from Dvan. "Restlessness. Yourself?"

"Duty."

Sedon chuckled. "Indeed? You were here last night as well, Dvan. They did not give you the same duty two nights running."

"I requested the duty, aye."

"Curiosity, then."

"Aye."

"About?"

"The children."

"Ah." Sedon c.o.c.ked his head to one side, stood watching Dvan. "Interesting, are they not?"

"I do not know what to make of them. They possess remarkable energy."

"I do not understand them myself, Dvan. I wonder at times if it was an accident that no healers were allowed to follow me into our exile."

"I do not understand you."

"When they are injured, Dvan, they heal with immense speed."

"Aye."

"You know several of them have died?"

"Aye."

"Do you know how?"

"No."

Sedon nodded. "Disease. They cut themselves, and some disease attacked them. And they did not throw it off, but instead died of it."

"It does not come together. How can they be so strong, and so weak?"

"Do me a favor, Dvan. Ask your Keeper that question."

Sedon turned away, and walked back as he had come.

Dvan did not realize until after he was gone that Sedon had not once looked toward the celebration of his exiles, toward their primitive, shuffling dance.

The Keeper Saliya saw Dvan often, for all his lack of seniority; Dvan thought She enjoyed him rather more than some of the other Shield, perhaps due to his size and strength.

The next time they were together, after he had finished with Her, he broached the subject of the children.

The waterspout in Her quarters had been modified to suit Her; rather than the abrupt sluice of water the waterspouts in Shield quarters granted, Her waterspout sprayed down into the bathing depression in a warm mist. Saliya knelt beneath the gentle shower, beads of water collecting and running down Her cheeks, across Her shoulders and b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Dvan lay on his side at the edge of the bathing depression, propped up on his right elbow, and watched Her bathe Herself. It was mildly erotic; he admired the languid, relaxed way She moved beneath the water, the way Her straight black hair hung wet down Her back; the way Her taut skin moved beneath Her fingers as She washed Herself.

"Saliya?"

Her voice was a relaxed murmur. "Aye, Dvan?"

"Saliya, I spoke to the heretic recently."

"Hmm."

"Saliya, he is concerned about the children."

The water had gathered in the bathing depression, until there was enough for Her to lie back in it; She did so, closing Her eyes and ducking Her head beneath the water. After a moment She raised Herself back up again, sat up in the shallow end of the depression, and pulled Her knees up to Her chest. She clasped Her hands together in front of Her knees, gold bracelets gleaming at Dvan, and sat looking at him without expression. "Indeed."

"Saliya, they are growing very quickly. Abnormally so."

Saliya sighed. "I am not surprised. When the Aneda denied exile even to those healers who requested it, I suspected they might have had something of this sort in mind."

"Saliya, something of what sort?"

"Dvan, when a child of the Flame People is born, we take it to the Temple, for consecration to the Flame. But at the same time, we introduce a-" She paused. "I don't think you have been taught the words. It is a sort of benign disease; it helps fight other diseases, but more important it slows the speed with which our people approach maturity. The older we get, the more slowly we age. There is some debate, among the healers, whether Flame People so treated do in factever reach maturity. I think I have not, and as you have probably heard, I am among the eldest of the Flame People; only a few who were alive during the Desertion are older." The calm brown eyes watched Dvan. "You will probably never meet one of the Aneda who actually served our Masters; they are displeasing to the eye, with wrinkled skin, problems of the joints, and other disabilities. They were already aged before the healers began distributing the disease that prevents aging; and the disease does not reverse that which has transpired."

Dvan's thoughts were so abuzz he forgot to address Her correctly, said simply, "Then these children-"

She shrugged, a minimal movement of the damp shoulders. If She noticed his rudeness, She did not comment on it. "They will grow quickly, and seem at first, as you have noticed, more vital, more alive, than one of our own. But they are using themselves up, and soon they will begin to age."

"And then-"

Ea'Tbad'Ijal'Saliya said simply, "Die."

The next time Dvan went to see Sedon, he found Sedon watching as the eldest of the exiled Dancers, Indo, sat with two of the boy children, Tan and Kent.

The boys knelt with Indo, in a rough triangle, breathing in time with him, hands linked together. Neither of the boys heard Dvan enter through the open doorway; with so little awareness of their surroundings, Dvan would not have recommended either of them for the Shield.

Engineers, perhaps.

Sedon inclined his head slightly at Dvan's approach, gestured to Dvan to sit with him; Indo himself gave no sign that he had heard Dvan's approach. Nonetheless Dvan did not fool himself that the old Dancer was not aware of him.

Dvan seated himself with Sedon against the far wall of the main room, some ten paces away from Indo and the boys, and waited for Indo to finish. Indo's voice, husky and somewhat ragged, insinuated itself into Dvan's awareness, though he tried not to listen.

"-walk across a great black plain, greater than the one that stretches away from our town. In the distance, a huge fountain of light awaits you. It is dark around you, dark above you, dark below, and you walk toward the light. The light reaches up toward the blackness above, the column of light fountaining up so high you cannot see where it ends. You are ten steps away from it, and now nine; eight; seven; six; five; four; three; two; one; you are within the light, and you open your eyes."

The boys' eyes flew open; the one who sat facing Dvan started visibly at the sight of the huge Shield watching them.

Indo rose in one smooth motion, spoke to the two with studied indifference. "You may leave us now.

Meditate upon what you saw today, and practice together at bringing the vision back on your own. I will see you again in a ten-day, and we will see how you have done."

The boys bowed to Indo, bowed again to Sedon, and a third time, most deeply, to Dvan. They backed out of the doorway, and ran once they were in the street.

"You will make Dancers of them?"

Indo snorted, knelt facing Sedon and Dvan; Sedon said merely, "We shall see. How are you, my friend?"

"Well. Yourself?"

The joke, old now, brought Sedon the faintest ghost of a smile. "Exiled, against my will, leading the shamed remnants of a failed rebellion in their exile, on a planet in the lace-ends of nowhere. Otherwise, well."

Indo said bluntly, "What said the Keeper?"

A pained look crossed Sedon's features. "Indo, calmly. You of all people should know how little hurry there is in this life. Let us enjoy the dance while we may?" Sedon turned to Dvan, smiled quickly, and said, "So, since he brought it up, what did the old woman say?"

Dvan answered with such gentleness as he could. "They will age, Sedon, and die, as our ancestors did before the Desertion."

Sedons features lost all expression; Indo's hardened into something harsh and terrible; for a startled moment, Dvan found himself seeing in Indo something of the manner of the Keeper. "So, then," said Sedon quietly, "they had no intention of allowing this colony to succeed. Betrayal upon betrayal."

"We should have continued the fight," Indo snapped.

"So you've said, many times." Sedon fixed his gaze upon Dvan. "She wished us to know this thing."

Dvan shrugged. "Or She did not care."

Sedon said abruptly, "Indo taught me, did you know that?"

Dvan shook his head. "I did not. I am-somewhat surprised."

Sedon laughed at that, genuinely amused. "If a man cannot turn his own teacher to heresy, then he has not hit upon a very good heresy. Who taught you, Dvan?"

Dvan hesitated just a moment. "We are not trained in the fashion of Dancers. Instructors-"

"Indeed," said Sedon impatiently. "Who?"

Dvan did not know why he was reluctant to answer the question. "So much as anyone, the Sentinel Marah."

"Ah. And his opinion of your piety, it is why you ended up my jailer during the trip out, is it not?"

Aye.

"You respect his opinion?"

"Very much."

"Indo," said Sedon, "made me a recommendation during the last winter, and I think I will act upon it now. Bear me this message, Dvan. Tell the Keeper that we have decided to move four of our Dancers, and half our people, to a new place, some five days' walk from here. We have found us a vein of iron ore near the new location, more easily worked than the one we have been laboring at; it should make the development of local industry an easier task."

"That is not why you are moving."