"Who are you, and what do you want?" the young man asked him.

"Who I am is irrelevant. Let's just say that Council would like to talk to me right now, and I am in no mood to talk with them. I will not disturb your dig or your findings. Take care just to stand there and do or say no more. I do not need warriors in the woods to threaten you. All I need do is tell you a simple fact that I know, and you and everyone here will be killed by Council.

Understand?"

They understood. They knew the way the rules worked and probably why he was now on the run. Forbidden knowledge. It was a sore point among all the scholars working in the undercouncils.

Hawks went over to the big tepee, unzipped it, and stepped inside. There was a small battery light just inside the doorway, and he switched it on.

The place was a mess, that was for sure. What he wanted was a weatherproof box about a meter deep and fifty centimeters high, probably with a handle on it and weighing about twenty kilograms. Not light but very well balanced. He had no trouble finding it, since it was one of those items that were used often enough that they were never pushed away in storage. In another pack were a dozen cartridges, each labeled in black marker. He then located the small emergency communications pack and made short work of it-he didn't want them calling in until he was well away. The machines could be easily traced when used, but he intended to be finished with them before somebody was told to look.

He went back out and was pleased to see that there was no surprise welcoming committee and that the pair were just standing there, still staring, not quite knowing what to do. Their eyes widened when they saw what he was taking. This was unprecedented, unheard of. Field expeditions had found themselves under siege, even looted and their members killed, but the systematic theft of a portable mindprint machine was something that simply had never occurred to either of them, nor could they understand it.

Hawks was not, however, particularly single-minded. "Where's the liquor cabinet?" he asked them.

'The what?"

"Come on-I'm running out of time and patience! Where does he keep the booze?"

There was something in his tone that convinced them. Never argue with a desperate and dangerous man, that was the rule. Just get the law after him.

"In there," the woman replied, gesturing. "A case in Dr. Kakukua's tepee."

He beckoned for Silent Woman and gave her directions. The two young people watched, fascinated and horrified by the strange, silent, naked woman with the garish tattoos, although both made a note that it would make descriptions of the criminals rather easy. The doctor, Hawks saw, had only high-quality stuff, none of that rot-gut brewed by the Illinois. He wished he could take it all, but Silent Woman was limited by the boxes to about twenty half-liter bottles. That was good enough.

"All right-now you remain here for a while," he told them. "I'm leaving someone over there to make sure we are well away before you go running off to bring the others here. They'll shoot a lone arrow into the dirt as they leave and run for it. You count to five hundred after that and we'll be gone."

He and Silent Woman ran back into the bush. "Stay here a couple of minutes," he told Cloud Dancer. "If they make an early break, give them a real scare.

Otherwise, give us a few minutes, then run for the canoe. We have to be out of here and hopefully out of range before they get their wits."

She nodded, and he and Silent Woman made for the canoe, then waited nervously for Cloud Dancer. She finally arrived and jumped in as he pushed off.

"I thought you weren't going to come," he said, relieved. "I was about to come and rescue you."

She laughed. "The woman got really brave and decided that no one was left. I sent an arrow so close to her that I believe they will be standing as still as carvings many years from now!"

They sailed by the dig and then continued on as far south as they dared. He decided that they would make camp on the east shore that evening. That way, any search parties would have to cross the river into lands held by other nations.

However, he decided first to make temporary camp, use the machine, then leave it there and continue on as far as they could until dark.

He found a good landing where there was no sign of human habitation and good cover, then proceeded to unpack and set up the machine. Both women stared at it nervously. Neither had ever before seen a true independently powered machine, and such things were spoken of as having the darkest magic.

Most of the cartridges were of local languages or the languages of some of the members of the dig, obviously chosen so they could get to know each other better. There also were reference recordings on the culture and the site itself and on uniform excavation procedures, essential for that kind of tedious work.

Hawks wanted the two standards, labeled eng-x and espan-x. These would give a basic overlay, causing the brain to associate words, terms, and phrases it already knew with the proper English or Spanish terms. It was not a cram course in the nuances of the languages; nobody using them would lose an accent or know words and terms without cross-references no matter what the size of the basic dictionary, but it would allow for communication.

He picked English simply because it had the largest vocabulary of all the known languages and as such was bound to have the best matches for esoteric languages.

He knew it worked well in translation from Hyiakutt; he had no idea what language Silent Woman had used.

Cloud Dancer looked suspiciously at the box. "What does it do?"

"It will teach you the tongue I used with the students. A tongue harsh to the ear but useful, since it is used so much. We cannot use it to teach Silent Woman Hyiakutt, so we must use this language so all three of us can communicate. It will also be useful should we come up against anyone from Council or in the camp of the Mud Runner and beyond. Please. You must do this, for me and for her sake."

She was dubious. "Can you not just run it on Silent Woman and translate?"

"Come on! It is a simple device. You saw what cooperation it brought from the digger camp. Besides, look at Silent Woman. If you do not do it, she certainly will not." He suddenly found another cartridge on which was written in English, survival.

"This one, too, is useful," he told her. "I believe it teaches how to survive in the wilderness with nothing at all. Emergency training. We may all need this.

Please- sit. It does not hurt. You feel a little sleepy, and then you know it all."

She looked nervously at Silent Woman, then at him, and sighed. "Very well. What do I do?"

"Just lie down here and get as comfortable as you can. I put this thing on your head, so, so that the small points here contact all around. There."

He inserted the cartridge, then turned the power on. There was no real noise, but three small lights blinked on. Silent Woman stared as if suddenly faced with a three-headed cat.

He punched the feed button, then sat back to wait the few minutes this program took to run. Silent Woman just sat and stared, suspicious but not really afraid.

When the machine clicked off, Cloud Dancer was asleep. Taking advantage of that, Hawks withdrew eng-x and inserted survival. To run it on all three did not present much of a risk, he decided, and it might just be useful.

She was still asleep when survival clicked off, and he roused her. She opened her eyes, looked into his, smiled, got up, then settled back down a meter or two away.

Silent Woman was more difficult to persuade, but she certainly trusted them by now, and she had seen no terrible effects on Cloud Dancer. She knew that the man would not do anything to harm his woman, so she accepted the mantle with a little nervousness.

Eng-x ran its course, and he ran survival once again. She, too, fell asleep and had to be coaxed to move away. He certainly intended to run survival on himself.

He needed it more than either of the women.

Survival was everything he had hoped for and more- perhaps too much more.

He found himself able to know instantly if berries were edible or poisonous, which water was safe and which was not, how to find shelter or make it under almost any conditions, how to keep from drowning, how to fashion weapons from the crudest materials found on the forest floor, and how to use them. It was also, however, a conditioning program that attacked inhibition. The concept of eating raw frog or a huge accumulation of crushed insects, for example, was no longer at all disgusting, and the concept of modesty was thrown out entirely.

The program was intended to be taken in the field while surrounded by friends and co-workers who would quickly reintroduce reality and perspective. It then remained as a silent rider to the consciousness, ready if needed but otherwise not evident. It was a way of grafting the survival skills of the most primitive savage onto the most civilized of personalities so that if they got into trouble, they would have a chance to survive until they could be rescued. It was not intended to be used by someone who already needed it and was mostly in the uncivilized condition it assumed.

He awoke first and looked over at the sleeping women. He knew who he was and who they were; all his memories were intact, along with his sense of purpose. He was acutely aware of danger, and he wanted to act fast. His tattered loincloth caught on a bush as he got up warily, and he reached down, snapped the thin rope in two, and threw the garment away. It was an encumbrance. Clothing for protection against the elements would have been practical; he could not even conceive of why he'd clung to that thing so long. Better under these conditions to toughen the skin.

They had all been so tired that they'd slept much longer than they should have.

The alarm had surely been raised by now. He took the small mindprint machine and the cartridges down to the river and threw them in. When both did not sink immediately, he jumped in, and with a little help they filled and went down.

Cloud Dancer was awake when he returned, and she looked at him approvingly. It was the nature of things now that he didn't even notice that she, too, had shed her modesty cloths. He switched to English to see if it all had worked. "How do you feel?"

"Different," she answered, her accent rather exotic but understandable. "Yet I cannot say how."

"Awake, Silent Woman," he ordered curtly. "We have all slept too long, and we must be well away from here before our enemies are upon us."

None of them could really comprehend the difference, but it was major. They no longer felt loyalty or longing for tribe and nation or even much kinship with it. Their tribe consisted only of the three of them. The first priority was the survival of the tribe, and then the individuals, no matter what the cost. The land was full of enemies: only the tribe could be trusted. As the only male of the tribe, Hawks was chief by default, and that was simply accepted by them all.

Silent Woman was almost ecstatic to discover she could understand their speech.

It was a kind of wondrous magic that reestablished her in the World.

"Hereafter we will use only this speech," he told Cloud Dancer. "It was always a tongue used to unite tribes; let it serve to unite us. Silent Woman, I see that you understand us now."

She nodded, mouth still open in wonder.

"Let us get far away from here, as far as we can. We do not know if the transmission from the machine was picked up, but we must assume that our enemies will be upon us at any moment."

They went back down to the canoe, which, in their new mind-set, seemed a real luxury to them. They crossed the river before the light failed and continued south, slowly and very near shore, looking for a proper camp. Then, working as a team, they left the river, methodically covered or disguised all traces that anyone had ever landed there, and carried the canoe well inland.

Academically and from old experience, Hawks understood what was going on- what the program was designed to do and what it was doing to them-but he did not fight it. It was the first thing he'd done by chance that had turned out right, and he was going to use it. Neither woman, of course, could understand the process and know how to fight it, anyway. For all the People, the priorities were family, then tribe, then nation. By accident, the survival program had reoriented those three categories to go with different labels. Their loyalty was to him now, and he to them-they were their own tribe. The threatening wilderness and the treacherous yet mighty river were their friends and allies against all other tribes and nations.

He got one of the bottles from the archaeologist's pack and opened it. Primitive hunter-gatherers they might now be, but they could neither hunt nor gather in this darkness and strange wood. Food would wait until dawn.

"There is energy in this fire drink, which is called bourbon," he told them. "We must use it for now, although too much will cause dullness and throbbing heads the next day. Drink in celebration, for now we are one."

They drank, all coughing as it made its way down. "It is like a fire inside that warms," Cloud Dancer noted. "Now I see why it is called fire drink." But they finished it off.

When the bottle was empty, he broke it on a stone and washed the sharp point in the river. "Until now I had a wife who stands here. Now I have two wives, and they are proven warriors as well, as brave as any man and as skilled." Silent Woman gave a short gasp, and he realized that until now she'd still considered herself a slave-his slave. "Tonight we will mix our blood and bind ourselves forever to one another."

Three cuts on three wrists were joined one after the other, then all together.

And then, full of togetherness and in the knowledge that they were as safe as they could expect and could do nothing more until morning, and being loosened with bourbon, the two ministered to him and he to them on the forest floor, and they slept entwined together.

"You assholes just stood there and let him steal a damned mindprint machine?"

Raven was aghast.

"And twenty bottles of good bourbon," the archaeologist chief added mournfully.

"It was only a portable unit. Not programmable. I can't imagine what good it'll do him."

"It'll make those bitches linguists," Raven replied. "Make it a lot easier moving south. You tell me quick what the nonlanguage cartridges were. I want to see just who and what we're dealing with now."

The survival cartridge's importance did not escape the Crow. "They've shown themselves to be right resourceful up to now," he told Warlock. "Now they can avoid all human company and still fill their bellies. Probably do better with the canoe, too."

"I have studied the charts," she responded. "If they get south of the Arkansas, they are going to be in a region that is heavily populated and thickly traveled.

He picked this place because it is of Council; his actions here will not affect his relations with the tribes. Down there he cannot escape detection or at least notice. The tattooed woman stands out in any situation. I cannot understand why he keeps her along. He must know that."

"Oh, he'll keep her," the Crow assured Warlock. "He's incurred an obligation, and that's an honorable man there. Still, the more people, the harder to use sensors to find a camp. We can't hardly roust every camp we find. Some of the tribes down there get a mite touchy and wouldn't be at all impressed with Council. My feeling is that we ought to pack it in, call in a skimmer, and wait for 'em at Mud Runner's place."

"Only as a last resort. If we were to spook him there, in those swamps, we might get him killed or lose him forever. We don't know where he thinks he's going, but he does, and he is one single-minded man. Whatever he knows, he believes it is worth any price."

"Well, I got to admit I don't like the odds down there," he said. "He's a stranger there, true, but so are we, and, pardon, we're just as conspicuous as he is. Those swamps have defeated just about everybody who ever tried to beat 'em rather than live with 'em. You got any ideas?"

"Just one. We have the advantage that we know he must stick close to the river and probably on it. Time is pressing him. The river is the only fast way to go.

We know what they look like and where they are going. We must stop chasing them and get ahead of them. Let me see the current charts."

They looked over the river course and the latest information. Charts of the Mississippi were always out of date, but this one was close. Warlock pointed a long finger at a spot well to the south. "There," she told him. "It is narrow, and see how it loops around. We could get two cracks at them there."

He nodded. "Okay. As long as they don't portage through the neck here."

"That is a chance I am willing to take. They have no charts; the river is full and could flood down there at any time. They can't portage across every oxbow or they would eat far more time than sticking to the water. I think they will come by there in a canoe in about three days. If we call in a skimmer, we can be there in a few hours and have that much time to prepare."

He nodded. "All right, I'll go with that. Better than the swamps, anyway. If we miss 'em, though, then it's Mud Runner or nothing."

She smiled enigmatically. "Then we will see if he lives up to his legendary reputation as a ladies' man."

Ordinarily the programs and data fed by a portable mindprinter faded as time went on; only a Master System unit could lock in permanent changes. However, it was also true that the more a skills program was used, the more entrenched it became: If you lived it and used it, it often integrated into the mind and achieved a level of permanency. Hawks insisted that the two women literally think in English and only in English.

Though a stronger imprint, the survival program was supposed to be emergency medicine, something carried in the hope that it would never be used. Under those conditions, it required regular retreatment with the machine. Once in use, however, the effects would last as long as necessary. Used too long, it could take on a life of its own, stripping away the last vestiges of a complex and refined culture like the Hyiakutt's and leaving only the savage primitive. It was designed to do this to one born and raised in the high-tech, pampered world of Council; the women came from cultures that were no less complex or primitive than Council in their own ways, but they were cultures much closer to the land.

There was less civilization to strip away. The authors of the survival program simply assumed that any such problems could be fixed once the person was located and rescued. An easy job for Master System-but they could never meet up with a Master System connect.

Hawks let it happen. Food, at least, was no problem now. What they had been best at before they were expert at now. His bowmanship was so perfect, it amazed him; Cloud Dancer could spear something almost instinctively, and Silent Woman could bring down birds in flight with stone or knife. The programming was geared to using what you had, and from the standpoint of survival they had quite a bit.

Minor ills, bruises, aches, and pains simply did not bother them anymore.

Fearing a major break or injury, Hawks urged quiet caution.

He also began to entertain doubts about Mud Runner. What if the Resident Agent didn't remember this wild man as his old friend? What if he turned them in?

What if, most probable, he just couldn't help? He had to be made to help, even if it meant telling him about the rings and their secret and thus passing on the obligation. Hawks didn't really want to do that anymore; now his thoughts ran in a different direction.

The fact was, he admitted to himself, that right now he was as happy as he had ever been. He felt both free and loved. He began to think about ways to fake his own death, to throw off pursuit. Perhaps truly to found a new tribe and live this life, which was satisfying. He was approaching middle age, not a good time to go wild, but he was in excellent health. There were programs that could erase a lifetime and alter forever a personality. Mud Runner might well have these.

For the first time he began to doubt his mission.

Why had he run? Because insatiable curiosity had forced him to read those papers and learn their deadly contents. He had fooled himself into thinking that it was some sort of noble mission to save humanity, but it was really just a bid to save his own neck. Until now his alternatives had been either to remain with the Hyiakutt or return to Council, but now there was another alternative.

If the bottom-line idea was to save his life and the lives of Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman, then which promised more? Passing on the information and depending on some Lord of the Middle Dark to save and protect them from Master System?

Or, perhaps, logic. A readout into a full mindprint machine would show that he had passed his knowledge to no one. A second record showing that all his knowledge had been erased, along with his past, and replaced with that of a primitive hunter-gatherer might not absolutely take the heat off, but Master System would be unlikely to send a Val or expend much effort on him. Death was the sentence only because Master System did not trust its own demon lords. But if no demon lord were involved...

Humanity could save itself. Someone had discovered the ancient knowledge; others would over time. What he had here was worth a thousand Master Systems.

9. THE WOUNDS OF HOPE.