The two men in the other canoe were dressed very strangely for the plains, and the styles of their hair and jewelry were also unfamiliar. One was an older, gray-haired man whose face looked as if it had been carved out of stone, while the other was quite young, possibly still in his teens. Both spoke a language Hawks had never heard before, but they took the canoe and two refugees in tow and brought them to the bank.

The young one's eyes lit up when he discovered that Cloud Dancer was unclothed, but this drew a sharp rebuke from the old man, who found them both blankets.

Hawks tried the seven Indian languages that he knew, but they all drew blanks.

The old man began reciting a litany that included Choctaw, Chickasaw, and the tongues of half a dozen lesser nations, but none that matched. Finally, Cloud Dancer took over.

"They are traders from the southeast," she told him. "They must be talked to as traders."

He understood what she meant. With better than two hundred nations speaking

six.

hundred dialects of a hundred and forty-odd languages, the people of North America had long ago developed a system of universal communication that involved hand signs and ideograms. Knowledge of it assured communications even between the far eastern Iroquois and the west coast Nez Perce. It was a good system but one he didn't know. Historians, after all, dealt with written records and physical remains-the permanence civilizations leave behind. "I do not know the hand tongue," he told her.

"I think I can do enough for our needs," she replied, and started with the old man, providing a running translation as best she could.

"He is Niowak," she told Hawks. "That is his grandson, who is learning the ways of the trade."

He didn't place the tribe, except that the name seemed to be in a far north dialect that was unlikely to be heard in the south this time of year.

"He comes down from the Niobrara," she said, confirming his suspicion. "He is on his way to a village of the Tahachapee to set up a trade of some sort. He won't say what."

"I could not imagine," Hawks responded. "I cannot see what a tribe so far south would have that they would need or what they would have that this southern tribe could want. Still, it is none of our affair."

"I told him that we were on our marriage trip when we were caught in the storm, then overturned with the loss of everything when strong waters caught us."

He nodded but said nothing to indicate that there was more to their story. Some of these traders spoke forty or fifty languages, feigning ignorance to gain an advantage. "Ask him where we are."

"He says we are two days north of the Ohio," she told him. "He offers to take us there, where there is a village of the Illinois."

"Thank him for his courtesy and generosity and accept his offer," he instructed.

He suddenly had a thought. "He is a trader. He certainly has at least one spare set of paddles. Ask if we can borrow a set and follow him down."

She did so. "He has. He is mad at himself for not thinking of it before. He says he is getting too old for this sort of thing."

The old trader proved a true gentleman and a resourceful one. He had a net, for one thing, which he suggested stringing between the two canoes in the shallows.

It brought up several large catfish as well as a few other denizens of the river, and they ate well without depleting the old man's supplies.

. The village of the Illinois was modest, but it had a number of buildings built of logs and insulated with mud and looked as if it had been built for a larger trade than was now there. The Illinois were taking advantage of the confluence of the two great rivers; they could resupply and also pass on news and other information-for a price, of course. From the looks of some of the men, Hawks suspected that they weren't above charging something of a toll as well-and enforcing it. They seemed pleasant enough, but this mercenary lot, far from the main part of their nation, was not apt to give anything out of the kindness of their hearts. The jewels would have been handy here.

The headman, a tough old character named Roaring Bull, spoke many languages, including the Ogalalla Sioux dialect, which Hawks knew.

"So you had an accident on your wedding trip," the Illinois chief said sympathetically. "Lost everything but the canoe. What do you intend to do now?"

"I can do nothing until I can get some clothing, paddles of my own, and at least a knife, spear, and flint," he responded honestly.

"Then you go home?"

"No. We must keep pushing south. I have an old friend down in the Caje that my wife has not met and with whom I have some business."

"Oh? What's his name? I know a lot of the Caje. We do business time to time, now and again."

"Mud Runner would be his name in Sioux. He pronounces it in his own tongue so."

With that he spoke the twisted syllables of the man's name.

"Ah! I do not know him, but I know of him. He is one of them. Why would you have business with one like him?"

"I, too, was one of them, as you say. That was where we knew each other."

Roaring Bull frowned suspiciously. "You from Council and you poking around here or what?"

"I am no longer in Council, and neither is he. Both of us are out for the same sort of thing, only I am voluntary. I fell in love with the woman who is now my wife, and I find we are better in her world together than she would be in Council. I tired of Council, anyway. Mud Runner also had affairs of the heart.

Often two or three a night. Some were with the wives of the high chiefs of Council, and one time he was caught."

The Illinois chief lived up to his name, roaring with laughter. Finally, though, he calmed down and got to business. "It would seem, then, that you have a problem," he noted calmly. "We have all the things you need, and more, but we are traders. How would it look if word got out that we gave things away? We get the worst and the toughest through here. Soon everyone would be trying to take advantage of us. You see how it is."

Hawks sighed. "Then I do in fact have a problem." He thought for a moment, although he'd worked out a plan in his mind on the way down. It was best to play the game in situations like this. "We do have the canoe. It is tough and sturdy and of the best workmanship. Surely it is worth the small amount that I ask."

"Hah! And how would you continue your journey?"

"We would find a way with some other traders. We will walk if we have to."

"Agh! I have a hundred canoes and only twenty men who can use them. I need no others. Think again."

His hopes were dashed. He wished Cloud Dancer were doing this negotiating, but in this situation it was simply not proper.

"I can see nothing else."

"No one travels from the land of the Hyiakutt to the land of the Caje to show off a pretty new wife. You must need to get to this man very badly," Roaring Bull said shrewdly. "I think perhaps you might not wish to be so cut off from Council as you say. Tell you what. I will get you good clothing, weapons, supplies, and even transport all the way to this Caje man. Good boots, strong spear, metal knife, even protection all the way."

Hawks felt uneasy. "And the price?"

Roaring Bull leaned in a bit and lowered his voice. "My friend, let us be honest with one another. I have been here, in this crossroads, for a very long time, and I have seen almost everything. I have seen men come through here many times who thought they could beat the system. Men just like you, although their tribes and goals were different. Nobody just walks out on Council, not for anybody.

Some get thrown out and are lucky, like your friend, and keep some job with Council, and some come back fixed in the head, but they don't walk out unless they have to, unless they are extra clever fellows like you who think they can beat the system before the system beats them. You may be out of Council, but you have left the Hyiakutt forever as well. I can smell it. To do that, you have something on your mind so important no risk is too great, no price too much to pay. I am a trader."

"Go on," Hawks responded uneasily.

"One thing I am never short of are pretty girls who are not of my people. Give me your wife and you will be safe and dry in Mud Runner's lodge within five days."

"Even if I did not love her, which I do, I owe her my life many times. She is not for trade. We will swim there naked if we must before I will do that."

Roaring Bull chuckled. "Come now, my son. You have made the break with your people and with Council. You know, if only deep down in your heart, that death awaits you, and death awaits her as well. This way you get at least a chance at whatever you are trying to do, and she will live. It seems more than fair."

"She will live as a slave of the Illinois."

The chief shrugged. "Each of us has a different life given to us by the Great Spirit. You cast your own fate when you made your choice, and it has brought you to this. It is my only offer."

"And if I refuse?"

"The leaves begin to turn. There is a chill from the north now and then that will grow stronger. I am not without some compassion. The two of you may sleep in the stables if you wish, and I will order that something be found for the sake of modesty, although it will not, I fear, help the coming chill. Some of the animal feed is all right for people if you look with care at it. Go-think over my offer. Be warned, though, that if you take one thing that is Illinois, my protection will be lifted, and you will both become slaves of the village."

He grinned. "It is the least I can do."

How true that was.

The "something for the sake of modesty" turned out to be two whiplike lengths of leather cord and the pick of old and discarded cloth that could be tied to hang down front and rear. The tribe was forbidden contact with them, so there was no way they could find an ally without getting both the tribal member and themselves in trouble.

They ate parts of rotten, worm-ridden apples and talked it over. He told her everything of Roaring Bull's offer.

She listened, a grave expression on her face, but she did not seem surprised at the situation. Finally she said, "Then we must look at all our choices. We cannot remain here, not for long, like this. Can we not try and find mercy among another trader going our way?"

He shook his head. "No, we are being watched even now. No trader landing here would risk taking us, since the traders are few and the warriors here many. The first duty of a trader is to his own trade. Nor can we get away and find one elsewhere. Even if we were permitted to leave or could lose our watcher, we would have to go up the Ohio, and this would mean coming right back past here.

To swim either river is far too dangerous; it almost boils where the two come together, and the distance is too great-for me, at least."

"We could simply launch our canoe and trust to the river spirits."

"Without paddles we would be caught in the rough waters to the south very quickly, and you know who would rescue us, and then there would be no bargains."

She thought a moment more. "Perhaps this chief will settle for less."

He looked at her. "What do you mean?"

"I have looked at the moon, and it is already past my bleeding time. I think the excitement and the shocks have dislodged it, but it will not be dislodged for long. It should be a safe time. Perhaps-a night in his bed for two paddles."

"No! I will not permit it! And it would only whet his appetite for you. We are at their mercy. The only reason he did not just take you was some twisted code they follow, but their honor is weak. He would accept the bargain, but he would be held to no bargain with a woman. It would be for nothing."

She sighed. "Then the only other way is to fight," she said flatly.

5. THE GAME OF CATS AND MOUSE.

SONG CHING WAS STILL NURSING HER MENTAL WOUNDS from her visit with her mother.

Her mother had always been one of her idealized people, the superwoman who could and did do it all and who had always loved and protected her, even many times against the cold whims of her father.

"You cannot let him do this!" she had wailed at her mother. "Please! To marry, yes. That is part of my station and my duties. But to have him wipe it all out-it is a waste!"

"Sit down over there, my less than honorable daughter, and listen," her mother had replied. "We must now have the talk that I have known we must have since you were little. Your tears do not tear at me this time, for I know now that you have tears only for yourself, never for others. Now you will sit, and you will listen."

"Most honorable and loving mother, I-"

"Do not speak thus now, for you do not mean those words. This is not a good world or an honorable one. I doubt if the world has ever truly been any different, no matter how we romanticize it. Your life has been so sheltered, so privileged, that you do not even truly know what the lives of most of your race are like. Oh, you have played at being a peasant in the small peasant play place that we have here, but that is not truly what that life is like. It is clean, and you always know that you are playing, that servants are but a gesture away, that nothing truly bad will happen to you, and that you will return to the silks and flowers and fine food at day's end. I am not even talking about the Center; I am talking about here, on our island, in our native province."

The inevitable lecture always had to come first, although this was a new variation on the theme. Song Ching just sat and waited it out.

"Most children are born to women without benefit of doctors or medicine in their own miserable one-room huts near the fields and paddies where they work from dawn to dusk with never a break, never a holiday, never even a day off. They must make their quotas or starve, since if they do not make their quotas, many others will also go hungry. They leave their excrement in pit toilets; the flies and other insects are always there, and so is the smell. They eat two meals of rice mixed with some vegetables or, rarely, a communally shared small portion of unprocessed meat. They face heat and cold, flood and drought, pestilence and eternal poverty. They are ignorant, superstitious, have never imagined electricity, indoor plumbing, or any sort of mass communications and transportation. Their view of luxury and longing is silk clothing and Peking duck, neither of which they are likely to enjoy in their lives. You know nothing of this."

"Neither do you," Song Ching responded petulantly. "Not really."

"You think not. I was born of peasant stock on a landhold barely a hundred kilometers from here, on this island. I was born at four in the morning; my mother was ordered out to continue the rice harvest by noon-and she did. The mud and flies and filth were my home and my early memories."

Song Ching stared up at her mother. "If this is so, why am I just now hearing of it?"

"Because you were born and raised in the leadership, the upper classes, where such peasant blood would have worried you, and it is not something one bandies about in our society without causing prejudices to form."

"If it is true," her daughter responded, not really believing it, "then how did you come to your position?"

"Your father is a most-unusual man. He was born and raised to be a soldier, but he had a bent for science and a head for figures, and so he was chosen at the age of twelve to go to Center for education and training, to become one of the Elect. He excelled because he allowed nothing at all to stand in the way of his advancement. We like to believe that his coldness and his callous indifference to others is a mask, but it is not. He wears no mask. I doubt if your father feels emotion, at least in the same way that other men do. I do not think he can. In a sense, he is more like the machines which rule us than a true man. He made himself that way, because to think like them and be like them is to know them and be favored by them. When he conceived his idea of dynastic genetic manipulation, he of course needed to found a dynasty. He required a wife."

"And he selected a peasant over all those of his class here and at the Center?"

"I do not know the process, except that it was calculated as finely as one of his equations. He knew the truth, although it is heresy to say it, that there is no difference between peasant stock and aristocratic stock except who your family is and how much wealth it has. They came to the village one day and took samples of the blood of every girl under fourteen. He wished a peasant girl because while he needed someone intelligent, he did not wish a highly educated and polished woman. He wanted someone with no family of consequence that he would have to accept or deal with, as he would with aristocratic or Center women. My family could not afford many girls; they were delighted to be rid of me. Just what, genetically, he saw that made me the one is something I have never known. The answer to 'Why me?' is an absurdity. It had to be someone. It was me."

"But you are a botanist! An educated woman of accomplishment beyond the home!"

"I took it up after I was at Center and it was necessary to give me the teachings and background needed to live there. He permitted it so long as it was always secondary to my role of wife and hostess and politician for him. And, of course, I was the subject of his experimentations, out of which came you. During all that time I have never complained, never regretted, never had second thoughts. Although I am dead to my village and my own family, I have never forgotten them or their lot, and I have always thanked the gods for giving me this life, and I have tried hard to do my duty and carry out my responsibilities as his wife."

Song Ching was silent for a moment. "Why do you tell me this now?" she asked finally.

"Ever since you were born, you have been coddled and spoiled. You have had only the best of everything. You have been insulated from the outside world and its ways. In the past few years, you have dared things that would have gotten any other executed, no matter what her class or station, whether woman or man. I knew that he was testing out and protecting his handiwork, but I, too, allowed and excused it, although on different grounds. I knew that one day you would have to face your own destiny and carry out the duties and responsibilities your father intended for you, and we both knew that considering the spoiled and self-centered world you lived in, this would not be possible without locally adapting you."

The term "locally adapting" sent a chill up Song Ching's spine. It meant that her mind, her memories, her talents and abilities, her personality and attitudes would be eliminated or manipulated and replaced with a far different and radically inferior template-but that such changes, although accomplished by both permanent psychochem-icals and reprogramming, would not be passed on in any way to her offspring.

"How can you let this happen? I am your daughter!"

"I could not stop it. Deep down, you know that. It is too important to your father. Still, I can remember the cold, and the mud, and the hunger gnawing at the pit of my stomach. I will always remember it. You will never have that. You will have your silks and perfumes, your fine food, servants, and all the rest.

You will not be a part of Administration, so you will not have to undergo memory imprints and Withdrawal and all the rest. No man will have you as a wife as you are. You have no sense of honor, duty, family, sacrifice, even love except for yourself. I say that in shame, for I am partly to blame for it."

"Who says I must have a husband, anyway? Why must women always defer to men? I'm smarter than any man I ever met. I can do great things with the machines, maybe greater ones if I continue my work and my studies. Am I a person or a test animal?"