"Captain, if there are people starving on Thiopa-was "They may not be starving merely because of ecological catastrophe," Picard suggested.

"Their plight may be caused as much-or more-by political decisions made by the government in Bareesh. If that's the case, then who's to say that our emergency relief supplies will ever get to the people who truly need them?"

Riker planted his elbows on the conference table.

"The Thiopans must really need that food, and not just to feed those Sojourners and their sympathizers out in this Endrayan Realm. Things must be worse than that feast made them appear or they wouldn't have sent such an urgent S.o.s. to the Federation.

Agreed?" He glanced around for signs of dissent, got none, and continued. "Let's proceed under the a.s.sumption that we've got something they want and they've got something we want."

"Information about just what's going on down there," said Troi. "Right. So let's go through the motions of making our delivery, but we'll drag our feet, make them think we just night take our container ships and go home."

"A reasonable first approach, Number One,"

said Picard. "Apply a little gentle pressure.

Which I can also apply when I meet with Sovereign Protector Stross tomorrow."

"I am scheduled to meet with Dr. Keat tomorrow as well," Data added "So our approach is threep.r.o.nged."

Picard leaned back in his chair, his eyes revealing his weariness. "Tomorrow had better provide us with some answers. I want to start tying up loose ends-the quicker the better. Data, what about this weather control project? Is it possible?"

"In principle. Weather is a product of atmospheric density and const.i.tuents, land ma.s.s arrangement, air and water temperature, wind speed and direction, amount and intensity of sunlight reaching the planet, cosmic radiation, angle of planetary axis, precession of equinoxes, and effects produced by flora and fauna, including-was Picard waved his hand impatiently. "I don't need a catalog of factors."

"Of course. As I started to say, weather control is theoretically possible, up to a point. In terraforming a planet, technicians and designers can actually create weather in an environment where none exists. But that takes years, or decades, depending on the original state of the planet.

However, even the most advanced technology in the Federation is not capable of controlling or manipulating the weather around an entire planet simultaneously."

"What can be done?"

"Pockets of artificially controlled weather can be created by interrupting, redirecting, or augmenting key natural wind currents, modifying the temperature of large bodies of water, adding or deducting atmospheric moisture-was "All these strategies sound as if they'd require immense amounts of energy,"

Picard said.

"That is true, Captain."

"It also sounds like a house of cards," said Riker. Data tilted his head quizzically, so Riker explained. "Complex interrelationships of factors-change one, and it affects all the others, which in turn add their own effects."

Data grasped the meaning. "That is correct, sir. And even advanced computer modeling is inadequate for predicting exact results, since there are too many variables that cannot be controlled or even charted."

"Bottom line," said Picard. "Can the Thiopans successfully accomplish what Stross and Dr. Keat say they're going to do?"

"Based on our limited observations of Thiopa's level of technology, and the Thiopans'

lack of success in managing their environment, I would tentatively conclude that such a project is beyond their capabilities."

"Tentatively?" Picard said.

"Yes, sir. It is possible that they possess knowledge of which we are not aware. Possible-but unlikely."

"When you meet with Dr. Keat tomorrow, try to find out enough to make that a.n.a.lysis more definite.

All right, then, if there's nothing else ..."

Riker lifted a hand. "There is one thing."

"Which is ...?"

"Undrun. Do we tell him what we're planning?"

Picard nodded. "He is the Federation's liaison with the Thiopan government so far as the relief supplies are concerned. He has a right to be informed as to why we're not delivering them just yet.

Computer, where is Amba.s.sador Undrun?"

"Sickbay."

"Picard to sickbay."

Kate Pulaski answered, her voice tired and hoa.r.s.e. "Sickbay here. What is it, Captain?"

"Rough day for you, too, Doctor?"

"Only since Mr. Undrun checked in."

"Is he awake and lucid?"

"He is."

"Amba.s.sador Undrun, this is Captain Picard."

Undrun's voice came over the intercom. "I want you to force the Thiopan government to provide a more suitable place to store the Federation's emergency supplies."

Out of the corner of his eye, Picard saw Riker shake his head wearily. "We are not permitted to force them to do anything of the sort. I'll send you a transcript of the conference I just had with Commanders Riker and Data and Counselor Troi. If you review it, you'll be completely briefed on the decision we've just made to delay delivery of the relief cargo to the Thiopans."

"I want that food delivered as soon as possible," Undrun bl.u.s.tered. "Mr.

Amba.s.sador, you're the one who just said that the Thiopans haven't provided an appropriate storage facility. That is what you and Commander Riker will see to first thing tomorrow. The delay is merely procedural."

That caught Undrun off guard and he stammered for a moment. "I-I-That food has to get through to starving people. Is that clear?"

"Quite clear, sir."

Undrun lowered his voice suspiciously. "I may be drugged, but I'm not stupid, Captain Picard. If you interfere with the completion of my relief mission in any way, I'll lodge a formal protest with Starfleet. I can make you very sorry-was "I already am," Picard muttered under his breath.

"What was that? I didn't hear you."

"I started to say I am in agreement with you about the importance of this mission. Good night, sir."

Picard's jaw muscles twitched. Somehow, when it came to Amba.s.sador Frid Undrun, the single simple word "vexatious" no longer seemed adequate.

IN TIM SA'DRIT VOID, on the high side of noon, the sun held dominion. It filled the sky and parched the land. It whitewashed everything within sight of its unblinking glare. Only now, as it rode toward the barren horizon, did merciful shadows begin to steal across baked. rock and dust, like creatures creeping from daytime hiding places.

One of those shadows, cast by the crags atop a savage ridge of time-torn stone, fell across a subordinate ledge. That ledge, in turn, hung over a narrow pa.s.s between flat-topped peaks. From that vantage point, two lookouts lying on their bellies watched the lifeless plain stretching vastly below them.

There were living things out there, and they were getting closer. At first they'd looked like mites wriggling in the distant shimmer of the sun's fire.

After a time, they had resolved into animals with men riding on them. The lookouts were both women, one young, one older, with wrinkles framing her eyes and whiskers already turned gray. The younger peered through binoculars, touching a servo b.u.t.ton to focus the zoom lens. "How many, Mori?" asked the older sentry in a hoa.r.s.e voice. Mori didn't answer right away. She watched the odd gait of the animals-there were two-as their slender legs plodded in slow sequence, heads swaying to an altogether separate rhythm. These were full-grown ealixes, taller than a man, rotund bodies covered with the fine pinkish hair that didn't fill in until the gentle beasts were well into their second year. The light coat protected their hide from the sun but allowed air to circulate and help keep them cool.

"Two animals, two riders-carrying a body."

The older one muttered a sharp curse. "Another dead fighter for Lessandra's collection," she hissed. "Can you make out their faces?"

Mori squinted into her viewer. The riders were dressed in standard desert garb-loose robes of pale cloth, gathered at the waist with a bright sash, woven leggings and sandals. The robes had a scarflike collar, the ends of which dangled open during the scorching days, ready to be bundled around the neck to retain body heat when temperatures plunged after dark. Floppy hoods were also st.i.tched onto the garments, and the approaching travelers had pulled theirs up to protect their heads from the sun.

Their faces were hidden in shadow. "No." Mori rolled onto one elbow to look at her companion.

"Glin, do you really think Lessandra's wrong about all this?"

Glin's scowl softened as she scrutinized her young partner. Where Glin's face was weathered and lined by time and bitter experience, Mori's was as fresh and smooth as a newly bloomed flower. She was a grown woman now, though she had recently cropped her hair short and ragged in an effort to look older-an unsuccessful effort. But the hardscrabble life that lay before her would rob Mori of her innocence soon enough. "Yes," Glin finally said.

"I think Lessandra's wrong. It's gone too far. She's pushing Stross as if she thinks we're the ones with the power."

"We do have power," Mori protested.

"Enough to hurt them-but not enough to win. If it comes to a war, the numbers say we have to lose. A lot of us think Stross would rather do other things than pick up the pieces after we set off bombs. He'd rather not send hoverjets out here to try to catch us in the open."

"Which we almost never are." Mori looked away, annoyed at Glin's implication.

"That's my point, little one. Your father taught us what Sojourners knew in the old times."

Mori turned back, her head tipped like a student afraid to answer a question. "That the Hidden Hand leads us on the better path?" "Exactly.

All the dead we've buried make it obvious that the better path is negotiation."

"Lessandra says the government will never negotiate."

"Then we've got nothing to lose. We will make the offer. If they come to the table to talk, we don't have to accept any terms we don't like. We're free to resume our fight. Same if they refuse to talk at all. But if we can talk and agree, then we'll gain what we want 82 most-the-right to live peacefully in our own lands and by our own rules." "But Lessandra says the government is ruining the whole world and that we are not immune to their toxins. If they poison their air and water, they poison our air and water, too. She says we have to make the rest of the world return to the old ways. It's not enough, for us to go back to them."

Glins eyes narrowed. "I know what she thinks.

What do you think?" "I-I'm not sure."

"Lessandra says things that differ from what your father wrote and preached all those years. He didn't believe in forcing other people to follow our ways unless they wanted to."

"But he's been gone for twenty years-almost my whole life," Mori blurted. "How do we know that what he believed back then is right for what we face today?"

"Because what he believed came from the old times.

He rediscovered the Testaments and made them fit our world. Lessandra can reinterpret Evain all she wants, but that doesn't make her right."

"If my father was as persuasive as everybody says he was, he could have settled all this."

"Mori, he's dead."

"We don't know that, not for sure." The young woman's voice quavered. "Mori-was "We don't know!" Mori scrambled to her feet. "Just because the government said he died in prison doesn't mean it's true. All those stories-was "Are just stories. n.o.body knows if those other prisoners really saw your father alive.

Now go tell 83 Lessandra we saw fighters returning. Tell her one of them is dead."

Sandals scuffing in the dirt, Mori hurried off with her head bowed in dejection. The Sojourners never believed anything the government said, so why were they so willing to believe that her father had died in captivity two years after he was captured? They had charged him with treason, found him guilty, sentenced him to life in prison-but they never said they would execute him.

Elders, like Glin, had told Mori that the government wanted to keep Evain alive as a symbol of swift but fair justice and as a warning to other Sojourners of the government's determination to keep order. If Evain had been executed, as many people demanded, martyrdom would have imbued his legacy with a power he could never have attained in life.

Still, only two years after his conviction, the government announced that Evain had taken sick and died, in spite of the best medical care available. On his deathbed, he had recanted all his Sojourner beliefs, they'd said, and endorsed Stross's vision of Fusion-a united Thiopa marching boldly toward the future under the banner of progress through technology. They built a tomb for him in Heroes' Park, in the heart of the capital, and schoolchildren were taught from then on how the government's most implacable enemy had seen the light in his last mortal moments, thanks to the kinder and gentler wisdom of Sovereign Protector Ruer Stross ... Uncle Stross.

Mori was only five when it happened. Evain's death left her an orphan with no close relatives. She was raised by the community that had followed her father.

But she'd never felt neglected; all her father's closest friends had taken an active role in her upbringing. She had never wanted for love or attention-quite the opposite. At least a half-dozen good people thought of her as their own child. But she had always felt closest to Lessandra, Glin, and Durren, who might be one of the fighters now on his way back to the Sojourners' sacred mountain stronghold. If he was the one who had died-She stomped on that morbid thought before it could take root.

Durren was too wily to get caught.

Mori made her way up the rocky trail, following the narrow steps chipped into the stone two thousand years earlier by the first Sojourners. She hadn't been born out here in the wilderness but in a city, like most Thiopans. Mannowai City was the capital of the Endrayan Realm, not as grand as Bareesh but quite comfortable and modem, and the center of the renaissance of Sojourner teachings led by her father.

Mori had vague recollections of having visited this ancestral land as a toddler, on a pilgrimage with her father and others, but she couldn't be certain if her memories were of the trip itself or of hearing others tell about it in the years since.

It wasn't until a couple of years after her father's death that the core of the Sojourners, numbering three or four hundred, had left the cities and towns of the western Endrayan-which were within easy striking distance of government police forays from the adjacent Bareeshan Realm-and returned to the holy place from whence Sojourner beliefs had originally sprung.

So Mori had essentially grown up here. She'd forgotten most of her childhood knowledge about navigating city streets and had acquired the skills needed to survive in the unforgiving Sa'drit Void. It seemed now as if she'd always known how to find food and water, how to conserve what little could be found, how to coexist with the Mother World and her Hidden Hand, never forgetting the fundamental principle of the Sojourners' belief that the land did not belong to the people-the people belonged to the land.

Conditions here were not as primitive now as they had been in the old times. The new Sojourners had modern weapons, tools, and techniques to help them. Evain, and later Lessandra and the other leaders of the group, understood the practical need to utilize every advantage they could in their war with the government.

Mori hurried along the path that wound around the rim of Sanctuary Canyon. Here, forces she could barely fathom had wielded the very powers of creation to sculpt a landscape she would always regard as miraculous. The canyon itself was a broad chasm, a semicircle of layered rock that widened as it rose. But it did not open to the sky, for at the widest point, the canyon blended into thousand-foot-high walls that leaned in as if frozen in precarious midcollapse. In the bowl of the central hollow, the furies of wind and water, fire and ice, had cut through giant blocks of sandstone, reshaping them into fragile arches.

On one side, floodwaters had crafted a gallery of swirling chambers and tunnels that overlapped with astonishing complexity. But most miraculous of all was the cradle of everything the Sojourners had been and might become 86 the Stone City. All those primal forces had carved a long, low diagonal cleft in the belly of Mount Abrai. There, perched in this niche above Sanctuary Canyon, Mori's ancestors had built their most sacred place. At this time of day, the rays of the setting sun streamed over the cliffs that guarded the front of the wide gorge, splashing the facades of the Stone City with golden light. The buildings were as old as the Sojourners, constructed of meticulously honed sandstone bricks. They ranged in size from hovels to a four-level structure with arched ramparts.

Mori found Lessandra hunched over the furrows of her garden in a pool of afternoon sunlight. Although the Stone City was in shadow most of the day, hardy species of plant life needing minimal light managed to sprout, including vines bearing the sweet blue silberry. But this year's vines were shriveled and barren. A hint of a breeze riffled Lessandra's white hair as she pressed seeds into the ground and patted handfuls of gritty soil over them.

"Nothing grew this year, Lessandra," Mori said. "The underground springs have dried up. What's the point of planting more seeds?"

Lessandra picked up her walking stick, dug it into the ground, and used it to stand up. Her right leg was missing below the knee, the hem of her legging pinned up to cover the stump. She propped the stick's padded k.n.o.b under her arm. She wasn't young, and she looked older. One lashless eyelid drooped, and a fine network of creases incised her leathery skin. She fixed Mori with a one-eyed gaze. "Because it's our way. It's a renewal of hope that our Mother will forgive us for what's been done to her land. She'll see we're trying to 87 make it better. And she'll send us the water we need. Sacrifice and resurrection. Why are you questioning the Testament?"

Mori replied with a sullen shrug. "It just seems so useless."

The old woman rested her weight on the crutch.

"You know better than that," she scolded.

"We spotted someone coming."

"Who?"