"Quilla. And Hoku."

Hart. Laur froze, then panicked.

"Go away," she demanded. "I have a headache. I don't want to see you."

"You asked me to come," Hoku said.

"I was wrong. I don't need to see you. Please go away."

"At least let me help your headache." Hoku's voice sounded gentle. At last Laur opened the door. Hoku and Quilla stepped inside, and Quilla locked the door. Laur retreated to the bed and sat on it, staring at the other women.

Quilla sat beside Laur and took her hand. "What is it, Laur? You look sick."

"No," Hoku said, "she looks terrified."

Laur looked from Hoku's calm, wrinkled face to Quilla's concerned, smooth one. Such strong people. So much stronger than her. Strong enough to carry the doubt, strong enough to make sense of it. They would help, and Quilla would take care of everything. Of her. Of Hart.

She held to Quilla's hand and told them the entire story, commencing with the meeting with Hart before BeginningDay, including Biara's rebellion, concluding with the missing basement window. She emphasized Hart's kindness and concern, she talked about the heat and her own increasing confusion.

Quilla and Hoku listened and she felt her fear lessen.

Hoku sat back and frowned. "Only one way of telling," she muttered.

"By going to Hart's?" Quilla said. It wasn't a question. Hoku nodded and opened her bag.

"Laur, I'll give you something to let you sleep. By morning we should know."

"No," Laur said. "If you're going, I'm going. I won't let you knock me out."

"Damn it, Laur, you're an old woman."

"I'm no older than you are, or not much. Someone has to take care of Hart."

"He's not a child, Laur!" Hoku snapped her case closed and glared.

"He's an adult, and he's dangerous."

"Hoku, please." Quilla put her hand on the doctor's arm. "We don't know that yet. It may not be his fault"

"You think not?" Hoku said.

Quilla pulled her hand back. "He's my brother," she said.

Hoku snorted. "Listen, both of you. If Hart's not up to anything, fine.

But if he is, and either one of you think to cover up for him, then you'd better say so right now. I'll find someone else to go with me. But I am going, and you're not going to stop me. Eight kasirene -- eight anyone -- is too damned many."

"I'll go," Quilla said. "Palen lost her pup. But don't forget that he's my brother, Hoku. You'd have to prove he's at fault, I won't just accept it without evidence."

Laur nodded. Hoku shrugged. "All right, then. Laur, you have to get out of that gown. Got any dark pants? Put them on. Quilla, we'll need a wrench, crowbar, anything like that Solid and heavy. Good. I'll meet you by the halaea out front in five minutes. And don't wake anyone."

"What if something happens?" Laur whispered.

Hoku reached into her medical bag. "I've got this," she said. Laur recognized one of the small, square stunners that had been salvaged years before from the NewHome ships.

"Don't kill him," Laur said. Hoku put the stunner into her bag and left the room.

Hoku led them along the stream. Water soaked into Laur's shoes, and the night seemed dense and quiet. Ahead of her, Hoku moved with surprising agility along the bank of the stream. She could hear Quilla walking in the rear. Both moons were out of the sky, one set and one not yet risen. She felt as though she walked in a dream, moving through a fantastical place on a fantastical mission. Her own lack of fear was also fantastical. She wondered if the walk would ever end.

Hoku stopped and ducked into some bushes. Laur and Quilla crouched beside her, and Quilla raised her head. She touched the others on their shoulders and motioned them to look.

Hart and Gren, dressed in dark clothes, crossed the stream a scant meter ahead, moving away from the house. Gren stumbled and cursed under his breath. Hart carried something on his back. The women watched in silence as the men moved out of sight; once they were gone Laur realized that she'd been holding her breath. Reality and fear returned, and the ground felt solid beneath her wet feet. Quilla and Hoku were already moving away, cutting away from the stream toward the row of houses. Laur followed.

They approached Hart's house from the rear. Hoku asked in a whisper where the window had been, and when Laur showed her, the doctor shook her head. Quilla walked around the entire house, returned, shrugged, and Hoku pointed toward the front door, gesturing that they had no choice.

Quilla took the crowbar from the loop of her belt and climbed the two steps to the door. She tried the knob, then slid the crowbar between the door and the sill beside the knob, braced herself, and jerked. The sound of splintering wood was loud in the darkness, but before the sound faded Hoku pushed Laur into the house and closed the door. There were no cries or noises from outside.

"We need a light," Hoku whispered.

"I've got lightsticks," Quilla said. Her clothing rustled.

"Wait until I check the windows," Laur said, and Quilla waited while she moved through the rooms, making sure that the heavy curtains were closed.

She bumped into the couch, then into the table, which hurt her hip.

"All right," she said.

Quilla struck the light. It flickered. Hoku found an oil lamp and lit it, and in its glow they searched the house for the hidden door.

Fifteen minutes later they looked at each other with bafflement. Hoku opened her mouth, but Quilla waved a hand at her.

"Wait," she said, frowning. She paced the length, then the breadth, of the house, her lips moving. Laur leaned against a table and watched, her mind blank. Quilla's footsteps stopped beside the wall where the living room and bedroom met.

"There are about sixty centimeters missing somewhere," Quilla said. "I think it's in the clothes niche."

It was. The shelves of neatly folded clothing were hinged at the side, and as Hoku jiggled them they moved, revealing a gap in the flooring through which a ladder poked its top.

"I'll go first," Hoku said. All the lines in her face seemed turned down.

Quilla gestured, then turned away, and Hoku put her foot on the top rung of the ladder. Laur took a breath and stepped to the hole in the floor.

"You don't have to go," Quilla said. The doctor was out of sight. Laur put her other foot on the ladder and descended.

The ladder shook under her feet and hands, and the light from Hoku's lamp made the darkness seem to shiver. Laur looked down at ranks of jars and bottles shelved against the nearest wall. Wine jugs, oil jars, miscellaneous bottles. Some empty, some filled, all labeled. As she moved lower, she saw a long, wide bench littered with bewildering equipment, things with knobs and slides and dials and gauges. Parts of toys. Pieces of tubing. Sheets of solar paneling. Patched-together raggedy machinery, homemade wonders. She shivered and put her feet on the floor, then turned to face the rest of the cellar.

The window still existed on the inside of the cellar. Laur felt weak with relief, then looked below the window to the large wooden table. Lengths of heavy material hung from its sides in long strips, and it had a crank at either end for raising or lowering it. A lamp on a hook hung over it. The table was scrubbed clean, the dirt floor packed hard and dampened to keep the dust down. The walls were sealed against moisture. Even the large, transparent vat at the far end of the room glistened, and the shape within it swayed rhythmically. Once Laur saw it, she could not look away. Together she and Hoku walked toward it and stood staring down. When Laur felt Quilla at her side, she reached over and took Quilla's hand.

The pouch had been slit, exposing the tiny nipples. Transparent tubes extended from the gut, connecting the submerged kasir with a large, patchwork machine near the vat. Fluid moved through each tube, from and toward the machine. A stitched incision stretched from the kasir's throat to her crotch; around it the pale gray fur had been shaved away. The kasir's eyelids flickered, then opened to reveal the violet eyes. If she saw the humans bending above her, she gave no sign.

"Why?" Quilla said. Her voice was unnaturally even, like her mother's when her mother was angry or disturbed. Or frightened.

"They need a womb," Hoku said and gestured. Laur glanced up to see more rows of jars. For a moment she did not understand what she saw, then realized that the jars held kasirene pups and embryos, from a tiny gray form the size of a fingernail to a pup well away from weaning. Palen's pup. Some of the forms had been slit, some flayed, some turned inside out. The lower jars held monsters. Furred, semi-human forms. Kasirene with two arms rather than four. A pouched human fetus, and others so mixed and mangled that she could not tell which characteristics of each species they possessed.

"Not gene manipulation," Hoku said. "They haven't the equipment for that. But grafting, graft-rejection techniques, embryonic transference -- all that they can do. Stick something into an embryo and stir it around and see what comes out." The doctor's voice broke and she turned away.

"But the humans," Laur said.

Hoku shrugged. "I don't know. Not from us. They haven't the equipment to mess with genes, but they could mess with gametes. I guess. I don't want to know."

Quilla put her hand in the tank and touched the kasir's neck. The body moved in response to the pressure, but the eyes did not shift.

"She's alive," Quilla said.

"Only technically."

Quilla's hand closed around the tubes, and she wrenched them out. The kasir shivered, closed her eyes and was still.

"Give me the stunner," Quilla said.

Hoku shook her head. "No, Quil." The doctor looked tired, in pain, sickened, and resolute. "These deaths are enough. I keep the stunner."

Quilla and Hoku stared at each other while Laur watched them, then Quilla made a helpless gesture with her hands and turned away.

"They'll be back soon," she muttered.

"Good," Hoku said. She blew out the lamp.

Laur crouched on the floor and squeezed her eyes shut. Bright lights appeared under her lids, and she watched them, unthinking, until Hart's and Gren's return.

It seemed, to Laur, anticlimactic. The sound of the door overhead opening, treading on the floor, whispering, cursing when Hart discovered the shelves out of place. Not a simple burglary, he said in response to some muttered comment of Gren's. They came into the darkness, Gren first, while the women crouched behind the table. When Hart, too, reached the floor, Hoku rose, stunner in hand. Gren reached for something to fling at her and she hit him with the low beam. Hart watched Gren slump to the floor, then grinned at Hoku and said, "Caught me."

But his smile disappeared when Quilla and Laur stepped into the light, and he had not said a word since, not during the wait while Quilla fetched Jason and Mish, not during the quiet return to Tor Kennerin through the dark meadows, not during the restrained, painful conference in the closed living room of the Tor. Laur watched his expressionless face, each moment seeing less and less of the child she had loved and scolded, mothered and punished. It seemed to her that she attended a wake, that someone beloved had died, and she was deprived even of a body over which to mourn.

The next night, Jason and Quilla returned to Hart's home, buried the dead kasir and the pups, and destroyed the laboratory. Someone packed Hart's personal belongings, and Gren's, and brought them to the Tor. And the next morning, in the false dawn, Hetch and Jes checked the shuttle while Tham and Bakar tied Gren in a cargo hold for transport as far away from Aerie as possible. Merkit touched Quilla's hand and moved into the shuttle. And Hart, cold, silent Hart, mounted the ramp, destined for the university planet that his brother and sister could not attend, aimed for a future which Quilla had wanted desperately, and which he desired not at all. He stopped at the top of the ramp, Jason's hand around his arm, and turned to look at the hills of Aerie, at the kaedos just visible in the pale light, at the indistinct bulk of the Tor swathed in morning mists. Then he bent his head and gave Laur such a look of frigid hatred that she gripped Quilla's arm, gasped an unintelligible plea, and crumpled. The last thing she saw was Hart's contemptuous turn of the shoulder as he followed his father into the waiting ship.

*Meya*

WE HAD ALWAYS PLAYED GAMES, FROM THE very beginning. Simple games at first, the sort of things young children play: Hoops and Graces, Pitchball, Quia Tiger, and the nameless games children invent to flesh out their worlds.

Later the worlds became more complicated, lots of running about and climbing things and shouting lines. Playing parts from our fantasies. But as we grew older the life-games were no longer enough. How long can you get a thrill from being an Imperium Commander, or Zeonea the MasterRat? By the time we were fifteen or sixteen, the urge to play parts had faded; we were growing adult masks of our own then, and they were strange and uncomfortable, and much too unwieldy to need other masks on top of them. But while the masks tended to cut us off from each other, all those years of games made strong ties between us.

We grew apart as we tried to grow together. An uneasy time.

We? Oh, that would be about ten or twelve of us, depending on who was feuding with whom. Me, and Drel tor-Kanata, Pixie Hirem the lawyer's granddaughter, Kridee, Haley, Mertika the brewer's daughter, Wim, Teloret, Dane and Josha, Cumbe, Kabit who was Palen's pouch-sister, Puti from the Cault, some others. We were the first real generation of Aerans, we thought.

Those of us who were human were all born on Aerie, and the kasirene were the first to be integrated into our lives. Well, it seemed total integration to us; we'd all been through school together, spent our spare time together, got roped into chores together. The fact that the kasirene had their own village seemed insignificant. In any event, we were all in mid- to late adolescence and bored that summer, bored and lazy and out of games, energy, and ideas.

Sitting around being uncomfortable with our new bodies and changing minds. And terrified that if we didn't look busy, the adults would think up work for us to do.

Tabor started it. He saw us sitting around the stream one day, busy staring at our feet and getting grumpy with each other, and he told us about a game they had played on NewHome during his childhood. Something to do with a ball and a stick, a playing field, two goals, and a lot of running around. It sounded perfect, so we chased the younger children out of the schoolyard and tried it, while Tabor stumped around the edge of the field, waving his cane and shouting directions. The twins clung to the flapping tails of his shirt like two small 'bots hitched to a loader. One person threw the ball at another person, who tried to hit it with the stick. If the hitter connected, the stick was dropped and a lot of running took place, and other people tried to steal the goals while some of us tried to catch the ball and others to catch the runner. Within an hour it was apparent that the game would never do. The kasirene whapped the ball so hard that it sailed over the kaedos and disappeared, which was not good because we were short on balls. But the kasirene couldn't run worth straw. They could bound, of course, and covered impossible distances that way, but they were no good at short-distance evasion running, while we were. So the game would either be the kasirene whapping the ball into the woods and then a great hunt until we found it, or we would whap the ball as hard as we could while the kasirene caught each and every one before it came anywhere near the ground, and scooped up our runners with a great show of casual boredom. By the end of the afternoon we were exhausted and shouting at each other. Tabor apologized and limped away, trailing his children behind him.

He must have talked about it some, because Medi Lount came up with the next idea. We were hanging around the deserted marketplace, making a racket and up to no good, and she came out of her studio and demanded that we either go away or do something useful. We explained. Medi is something of a historian. She says that most of the good statues of ancient times concerned sports, and she'd done some research on the matter. She told us about a game from Terra, my parents' birthworld. Half of the players were runners who carried a ball around, and the other half were blockers; it sounded like an adult version of Pitchball. We tried it right there in the marketplace.

Think about it. The humans ranged from about one hundred fifty to two hundred centimeters, and about fifty to seventy kilograms (except for Wim, who was the fattest of us all). The smallest kasirene, though, weighed just under ninety kilograms and stood two hundred fifty centimeters tall. If the humans were running the ball, it was like smacking into a stone wall made of many arms and gray fur. If the kasirene ran the ball, each one lumbered down the field decked with five or six humans, each of us hanging on for dear life and not slowing the kasir down at all. And if we played with mixed teams, we had two games going instead of one, a human game and a kasirene game. It was a washout, but it looked so good that it took us two days to figure it out. Medi shrugged and went back to her clay.

Ved suggested a game having to do with ducking balls into pouches -- fishing-type pouches, not kasirene-type pouches. The kasirene just stood below the hanging straw pouches and dropped the ball in, time after time. If we had the ball, though, the kasirene did a lousy job trying to catch us, but if once they got the ball, the game might as well have ended right there, for all the chance we had of getting the ball back.

It began to seem as though the only thing happening that summer was an increasing rift between the humans and kasirene. Look at everything we had that was dissimilar, now that we were moving into adulthood and through our awakening sexuality. The outward, physical differences we had always known about -- their strength, our fleetness. Now a new area of difference was thrust upon us, and we all viewed it with increasing distrust.

That summer sex was the most important thing in the world -- after games, of course. We humans had two sexes, one of which bore and nursed children, the other of which didn't. The kasirene had two sexes also, one of which had wombs, and there the similarities ended. Kasirene pups are born as fetuses, and climb into the pouch to continue growth. It doesn't matter whose pouch, either; the males can nurture just as well as the females, and very often a kasir pup is passed from one adult to another as a pledge of love or friendship, for convenience, or sometimes at whim. We were all beginning to understand how different we were, each from the other, them from us. Our elders didn't help. No kasir in our group had either birthed or nurtured yet, although they were well past the age when such things were possible and even desired of them. Their elders claimed it was our evil influence, while every time one of us lost a virginity, our parents blamed it on the kasirene. Oh, there was plenty of sex going around that summer, and much comparing of notes and evaluation of technique. ("You can't do it standing up," Dane said with authority. Yes, you can, I thought, but I didn't tell him that.) Still, the areas of technique and the like rarely overlapped. The rift grew; we knew it, we didn't like it, but we couldn't think of anything to do about it. Save, perhaps, give up.

And we were none of us willing to do that. It was our last year of school. Adult life began the next summer, and giving in to it early meant giving up our leisure and our companionship. We tried to stretch childhood out as long as we could. It took some planning, and was thirsty work. So Mertika relieved her father's storeroom of a keg of beer, and we took it down beyond the stream one afternoon, well away from both human and kasirene villages. We stretched out on the grass, opened the keg, and discussed sports.

What resulted was just the sort of game to have been invented by a bunch of drunken adolescents on a hot summer's day, but I suppose that all sports are similar in that way. Eventually we called it "Caraem," the kasiri word for pouch, but that summer it was just "the game," and we invented it as we went along.

The schoolyard was a rectangle, about six by thirty meters, with a kaedo at the center of either end. Drel procured a couple of kasir fishing pouches and cut the bottoms out, and we hung one in each tree. The kasirene liked hitting balls with sticks, so we had one ball and one stick in the game, and to even things out Pixie Hirem invented long, curving scoops made of wood.

You hooked the ball from the air with the top end, and it whizzed along the inside of the curve and came shooting out the other. If you flicked the scoop in the middle of this, the ball arched high and wide over the field. We humans liked running, provided, of course, that there was a minimum of running into walls of kasirene, but there had to be room for kasiri bounding, too. And we all liked the idea of theft -- it resonated of SwampRats.

It's impossible to explain the game this way, from the bits and parcels that we pulled together during the next three weeks. Listen, here's what a game was like, late that summer, when we had it all figured out.

It's hot and a little humid, with a small breeze blowing in from the ocean and over the brow of the hill. We have an audience today; kasirene and humans gathered around the edges of the schoolyard, and children perched on the roof of the school or atop the fences. Wim sees all the people and gets nervous, but Dane, who's on the other team and has been trying to get into my pants all summer, saunters over and polishes his own ego at poor Wim's expense. I ignore him. We come out into the field,self-conscious but casual, in our uniforms. Green or purple -- I always play purple, and my uniform is a bright purple shirt that Mim has sewn for me. The kasirene uniforms are lengths of cloth wrapped in a complicated manner around their shoulders. The people make a great cheering noise and we try not to look pleased. There are eight of us on each team: two human catchers and two runners; two kasirene blockers and two whappers. We humans try to look cool and dangerous, and only look nervous. The kasirene try to look fierce, and succeed in looking comical.

Tabor referees the game; he lets our fans admire us for a while, then blows the starting whistle. Green's up, since purple won the last game. Their whapper, Kabit, stands dead center in the field facing the green pouch, and we all spread out and watch her. Tabor whistles to begin. Kabit tosses the ball in the air with her lower arms. She holds the stick with her upper arms, and as the ball comes down she whaps it toward the green basket; it's so smooth it looks like one even movement. Mertika nets the ball with her scoop and sends it to me, and I tuck it under my arm and run like hell down the length of the field toward the purple pouch. Around me, green blockers collide with purple blockers, a green runner tries a flying tackle which is thwarted, and my teammate Wim is standing right under our pouch, howling that I should get the ball to him. Teloret bounds past me and grabs the ball, lofts it, and whaps it to Wim, and fat Wim springs into the air and dunks the ball through the pouch.

Score! Except that green Kabit has rushed under our pouch, grabs the ball, and pushes it through the pouch and out, negating our score.

"Foul!" Teloret yells. Tabor disagrees. While we argue the point, green Kridee sneaks down the field and steals our Talisman and parades down the field. Triple score for green, and the green supporters shout gleefully while purple supporters curse and groan.

Second play, purple up. Drel whaps the ball, Kridee catches it and begins his run down the field. Teloret paces him, yelling insults, and I rush in front of him and steal the ball. It's not hard; his hands are always slippery with sweat. I whip around and head back toward our own pouch, and three green kasirene descend on me, coming from all directions. I evade, get turned around, turn back, and the world seems full of green uniforms.

"Puti!" I yelled. Puti bounds up to me, tucks me under her arm, and we fly toward the pouch. She flings me upward, I dunk the ball, land, grab the ball, dunk it again, and Tabor blows the end-play while green players shriek foul.

"Illegal for a kasir to carry the ball!" Kridee yells.

"She wasn't carrying the ball!" I yelled back.

"Was so!"

"Was not! I was carrying the ball and she was carrying me!"

Chaos and screaming. It's a play that Puti and I worked out on the sly, and Tabor seems to be buying our reasoning. Green supporters howl insults and threats, which Tabor ignores. Double score for purple. Third play.

Green up, and they make a botch of it. Kabit drops the ball a few moments into the play, and although green makes a single score, the foul is called, and as penalty Tabor decrees that they must return our Talisman. This is of benefit to us, for there are no points in stealing back your own Talisman. Green players and supporters argue but our Talisman is carried with great care back to our end of the field. Very great care -- it's forfeit the game if a Talisman is treated roughly. After all, Quilla only has two children, and she watches out for both of them. Jared is back at our pouch now, and thumbs his nose at Decca, who sits by the green pouch and makes a rude noise at him. The score is purple, four; green, six. And we're determined to win. Fourth play, purple up.