Patrick had been in the upper control dome, inspecting the flow readings from the station's numerous process lines. The crew chiefs sent him regular updates. Even though everything was nominal, Del Kellum would probably have plenty of suggestions on how to "fix" things.

Zhett hurried in from their quarters with Rex propped on her hip, connecting the toddler's harness to a small antigrav battery; when she released him, Rex bobbed along at her side like a tethered balloon. Her face was flushed. "It's always good to see my father." Her tone sounded weary rather than excited.

"From a distance," Patrick said. Zhett elbowed him.

Because it was a big shipping day for ekti, the skymine's industrial bay didn't have a berth for an unscheduled ship. Zhett got on the comm and instructed her father to land on one of the upper skydecks. "If you can handle it, Dad-it'll take some careful flying."

He made a rude noise and clicked off.

His ship took up two-thirds of the cramped skydeck, but he landed in perfect position. As soon as the big man descended from the ramp, Zhett ran forward to give her father a hug with a bobbing Rex in tow. Patrick shook the older man's hand. "Good to see you, sir."

Del clapped him on the back, but was more interested in scooping up his grandson. "Just came from Newstation and the election of the new Speaker. I had to be there for appearances, but what a clusterfart!"

"Sam Ricks won, we heard," Zhett said.

"Lee Iswander lost. Nobody imagines Ricks is qualified, but after the Sheol disaster..." Del made a silly noise at Rex, which caused the boy to giggle. He handed the toddler off to Zhett, who passed him to Patrick. "I needed an excuse to clear my brain, and what better excuse than to come see all my grandchildren?"

"Two of your grandchildren," Zhett said. "Shareen won't be back from Earth for a couple of days yet."

"Then I'll just have to stay long enough to see my favorite granddaughter. If the invitation stands?"

Patrick gave Zhett a What can you do? look. "Of course it stands."

"Don't know why you sent her to Earth, though. That girl needs Roamer training, not fancy impractical academics."

"She needs both," Patrick said. "But I agree she'll do better in a Roamer environment. A formalized class curriculum isn't Shareen's strong point."

"She belongs at Fireheart Station," Del announced. "Have her spend a year with Kotto Okiah-let her thrive. She has so much potential."

Zhett smiled as they made their way to the top of the skymine, because Del would want to inspect the skymine's activity. "Knowing Shareen, I think she'd end up teaching Kotto a few things."

Inside the control dome, the shift crew studied the ekti-reactor output and the gas densities in Golgen's cloud layers, as detected by dangling probe antennas. Pilots adjusted the directional output from the exhaust stacks to keep the big facility wandering along.

Del marched to one of the embedded screens to call up a summary and frowned when his old password didn't work. Without hesitation, he nudged aside one of the techs, accessed the system, then raised his eyebrows at Zhett. "That's an impressive production number, by damn. Up fifteen percent from my day. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the drogues aren't harassing you anymore."

"Shareen designed several of our engineering upgrades herself," Patrick said with understandable pride. "She's got a good feel for the operations."

Del eyed his son-in-law. "And have you figured out all the processes yet? Every skyminer needs to know every system."

"I've picked up quite a bit over the years. Zhett and I manage the skymine together."

"Of course she manages the skymine-she's my daughter."

"Fitzy and I do it together, Dad," Zhett corrected. Del had never resolved that in his mind. "I cured him of a life of luxury long ago. You should be glad he didn't go into Confederation politics."

Del gave a grudging nod. "He's better off here on the skymine. Or maybe I should take you to my distillery on Kuivahr-then you'd really get your hands dirty."

Patrick pulled Rex closer in his antigrav harness and gave his son a playful bounce. "As exciting as you make that sound, I think I'll stay here. We still have a family to raise."

Coming from a blue-blood family, not to mention being the grandson of a former Hansa chairman, Patrick had absolutely no interest in politics, though he could have had any number of ambassadorial positions or government posts. Patrick decided he preferred the Roamer way of life, and he was perfectly content with his spirited and beautiful wife.

"And where's my other grandson?" Del looked around the control dome as if he expected Toff to be working one of the stations. "Hope he's studying hard. His sister left some big shoes for him to fill."

"Toff is reminded of that every day," Patrick said. "We'll find him down on the loading dock. Busy day today. Four big shipments going out, open-grid cargo frameworks lined up and waiting to be loaded with ekti canisters."

"Let's go see the boy. Once I review how you do things, maybe I can offer suggestions for improvement. I have plenty of experience in industrial operations, you know-not to mention leading all the Roamer clans."

"We'll be happy to hear your suggestions," Patrick said. This time Zhett gave him the What can you do? look.

The skymine was a satisfying flurry of activity. Down on the cargo deck, the air was filled with fumes and stardrive exhaust, the smell of hot engines and cold chemical breezes. The bay rang with the clamor of tanks being loaded onto pallets, adjustment jets maneuvering cargo frames into place where their open grids were loaded with hundreds of ekti canisters for transport. Two empty cargo frames hovered outside in the sky, waiting to enter the big bay.

"You should have a subsidiary storage raft where you can keep surplus silos of ekti," Del announced. "You're producing faster than you can distribute."

Zhett pointed out the cargo doors. Not far off, a storage raft floated above the clouds, loaded with excess ekti tanks. "Like that one you mean?"

"Exactly like that, by damn. But you should really have two of them."

They did, in fact, have a second one under construction. Rather than point that out, Patrick said, "We'll run the numbers and see if it makes sense."

Outside, workers with safety jetpacks rode on slender swoopers, zooming around the skymine like wasps as they guided the waiting ships. The swoopers rode up to intercept a cargo hopper, while inspectors wearing helmets and insulated suits dove deeper to follow the probe lines.

Near one wall, Kristof was using antigrav handles to stack empty crates. Seeing his grandfather, he bounded over to them. Del Kellum sized up his grandson. "You must be five centimeters taller than last time, but there's not a speck of meat on your bones! Zhett, don't you ever feed this boy?"

Toff said, "I burn it off. There'll be enough time for me to fill out later." He playfully jabbed his grandfather's significant gut. "I hear it happens to everyone when they get older."

A loud crash outside the loading area startled them, and two jumpsuited loaders leaped out of the way. An incoming ship flown by an impatient pilot struck a glancing blow against a cargo frame, which jarred one of the racks loose. Trying to avert disaster, workers ran yelling and waving toward the open bay doors and the long drop into the sky, but they couldn't stop the collision.

The empty ship caromed off and went tumbling as the pilot reasserted control. The heavier cargo frame skidded to a halt on the deck, but ten ekti canisters were knocked loose and tumbled out of the bay and into Golgen's sky.

Zhett's mouth dropped open. "Damn clumsy asses! That's valuable stuff, and now it's-"

"I've got this, Mom." Toff grabbed one of the narrow swoopers and swung it around toward the open door. "Already got antigrav handles in my pockets. I can round up those tanks." He started the engine, lifted off from the deck. "All I have to do is fly faster than they can fall."

"Careful!" Patrick yelled-out of habit, not because it would make any impression.

Del was shocked. "You're letting the boy..."

Toff's swooper streaked out of the open bay door and plunged straight down the clouds below.

Zhett shrugged. "He's done it before."

Del chuckled and cupped his hands around his bearded mouth and shouted after him, "Watch out for hydrogues down there!"

"He's not going that deep," Zhett said. "He'll catch up with the canisters before they hit the secondary cloud deck. Otherwise, the mist will get too thick for him to see."

Bobbing in his antigrav harness, Rex seemed amused by the activity, as well as his brother flying off in such a rush. Patrick muttered to Del, "But please don't tell Toff not to find the drogues because then he'll do it just to prove himself."

CHAPTER.

31.

ARITA.

In the camp near the Klikiss ruins, researchers were stunned to learn of administrator Bolam's death. Eljiid was a rugged and unexplored world, however, with countless natural hazards-including poisonous plants.

Lara Vanh and Kam Pellieri prepared the administrator's body, while Tarker and Orfino wrote up a report, summarizing what had happened, to the best of their knowledge. Arita joined the research teams in an impromptu meeting to discuss the matter, and they decided to bury the man there rather than ship his body back through the transportal to Rheindic Co. Besides, Margaret Colicos was already under a cairn nearby, so they had the beginnings of a cemetery.

Although Arita had barely met the man, she helped with the burial after a cursory funeral service, piling rocks over his body in a cairn much smaller than the memorial for Margaret Colicos. Vanh played her stringed instrument.

Then the independent teams got back to work on their own projects. They didn't particularly need to be managed, although from that point on the teams were more careful to avoid native plants that might provoke deadly allergic reactions. Arita was glad that she had learned of the Whistler toxin before she blundered into the thickets in an attempt to connect with the possibly sentient cacti.

Day after day, she sat cross-legged at the edge of the Whistler grove and listened to them. As the breezes picked up, the gnarled, angular cacti began to whisper and mutter in what sounded like a secret conversation. When the winds grew stronger, she heard the fluting music that had given the plants their name. She tried to crack the code and learn the mysterious language, but it eluded her.

Because green priests, like her friend Collin, could hear the language of the worldforest, they spoke to the trees and to one another through the telink network. How she envied them. But the trees had found Arita wanting....

Arita had not become close with the other researchers here, though she was friendly enough with a few of them. At dinner, they ate a vegetable stir fry that Pellieri prepared with native edibles; they discussed their own work, Tarker and Orfino played another intense game of squares and disks. Arita was welcome to join them, and no one seemed interested that she was the daughter of King Peter and Queen Estarra-which was good, but Arita felt alone, thinking about her brother. By now, Reyn should be headed off to Earth, where he might be able to find the medical experts he needed.

Far from the worldforest, Arita gazed into the tangled thicket and watched the Whistlers stir in directions that had nothing to do with the breezes. The gabble of noises rose, then quieted. Before the complete hush, the murmur sounded like words.

For several days, Arita took images of other Eljiid flora, trying to develop a basic understanding of the world's plant types. Spiny succulents were the dominant forms in Eljiid's rocky, arid environment, and she catalogued more than forty types. But she was not satisfied with just imaging and recording-she wanted to understand the worldforest and the verdani mind, and she hoped the Whistlers might give her some clue.

Most of all, Arita wanted to understand why the trees had rejected her.

If the Whistlers were sentient, Arita wanted to touch them in the same way that a green priest touched the worldtrees. If there was a hope of her understanding, of connecting, she had to become part of the Whistler forest. That was why she had come to Eljiid in the first place.

She had seen the white boils on Bolam's face and arms, his eyes puffed shut, his face a grimace of agony, his throat closed off so he could not breathe. No one had performed an autopsy; everyone could see where he had scratched himself on the spines, and the extreme physical reaction was obvious.

But Arita wasn't so sure. She used delicate tools to take samples of the Whistler thorns, testing the intensity of the alkaloid poison. The camp researchers had been curious about the strange cacti for a long time, but no one had done a thorough study. If the Whistlers were as toxic as Bolam's death suggested, Arita was surprised no one else had died from a similar scratch. In fact, two structural engineers studying Klikiss architecture in the abandoned city confessed that they had tangled with Whistler thorns while climbing around the old buildings, but they had suffered only brief nausea and dizziness.

When Arita ran chemical tests on the thorns, she did find an alkaloid component, but the properties should have been hallucinogenic rather than poisonous. Maybe Bolam had an allergic reaction that had resulted in anaphylactic shock.

She distilled the alkaloid toxin, diluted it, and cautiously smeared a drop on her skin. She waited, but observed no reaction. Growing more daring, Arita added the toxin in successively higher concentrations. Only at full strength did her skin show a slight redness-not at all like Bolam's reaction. The Whistlers couldn't be as toxic as she had thought.

One evening in the gathering dusk, the Whistlers kept talking, humming, singing-and she wanted to understand. Leaving her warm rock, Arita walked into the thicket like a dancer, weaving her way, careful not to let the spines scratch her.

The cacti stirred, and a low hooting sound rose and fell. They were talking, she knew it. The Whistlers had a kind of sentience that might be part of the worldforest mind, or a separate entity of its own. Or maybe they were just cacti that made strange sounds when breezes blew through them.

She thought of Collin, how he could touch any worldtree, even a little treeling in a pot, and become part of an immense tapestry of thoughts and knowledge-a tapestry that excluded her.

Arita drew a deep breath, trying to forget the disappointment of that day. Without letting herself think, she reached out and grasped the nearest Whistler branch.

She felt the thin stab of the needles, a dozen pricks as the spines penetrated her skin. She thought she heard the whispering grow louder, and she closed her eyes, trying to let her mind flow into the plant network. She wanted to share with the Whistlers, tell them her passions, understand the interlinked community that spread beyond any individual plant, any individual person.

Her hands burned. The alkaloid secreted by the spines was in her bloodstream. Her pulse raced from more than just excitement and fear. Her thoughts grew sharper, more colorful, more intense. Her chest heaved like a set of bellows. Suddenly the night air felt hot. Her thoughts ricocheted in all directions, but she refused to release the Whistler. She gripped even tighter.

A trickle of blood ran down her hands, red and warm and now swirling with mysterious Whistler chemicals. Arita knew it was not a poison that would kill her. She wanted to join the Whistlers, to float among them and understand what they had to say.

Instead, she saw herself from more than two years ago-younger, energetic, optimistic. She'd spent years as an acolyte reading aloud to the worldtrees as a good Theron child should, tending them, following the instructions of the green priests. While Prince Reyn was being groomed as the next King of the Confederation, their parents endorsed her desire to take the green-there was no more essential Theron activity, and they were proud of her.

She and Collin planned to be green priests together. Though they were young, they both felt the attraction growing, a romance blossoming between two young people who belonged with each other. Arita imagined that someday she and Collin would be like her aunt Celli and uncle Solimar-green priests who had been together for two decades and now tended their own floating worldtrees at the Roamer complex of Fireheart Station.

Nervous about the green priest testing, Arita and Collin had gone into unexplored parts of the forest, running together for a time. But the test was a private thing. Each person had to endure his or her own rite to become a green priest, had to accept the verdani mind, surrender to the call of the forest. They would sink deep and then emerge transformed, green-skinned and forever different.

Arita remembered the wonder as the thickets stirred around her, worldtree fronds bending down, vines reaching up. Leaves stroked her naked legs, creepers wrapped around her ankles, her waist. Arita struggled at first, but then allowed it to happen. The living sentient forest enfolded her, and she could feel the powerful presence of the verdani mind, a brain composed of millions of trees connected through a quantum root system.

Arita's heart pounded-she couldn't breathe. She gasped even now as she stood among the Whistlers. Maybe it was the effect of the alkaloid poison, or just the reawakened painful memory that she had to live all over again....

Sleeping in the cocoon of foliage, young Arita had felt the grandeur of the forest, the millennia of experiences stored in an infinite number of thoughts. As a green priest, she would be able to access all of it. She could touch any tree, think about anything she wanted, talk to anyone else connected through telink. She felt the verdani in her mind, prying, changing, shifting. Arita opened herself up, surrendering utterly.

But her head pounded. Pain shot through her. It grew more intense, building to a crescendo- Until the forest rejected her.

The vines had recoiled and released her. The worldtree fronds backed away and left Arita on her knees gasping and confused. She stumbled out of the thicket, and when she looked down at her arms, she saw only her normal tan flesh, not the fresh green of a transformed priest. Arita realized she had failed. Although something had changed in her mind, she would not be a green priest.

She had begun sobbing as she realized just what a crushing defeat this was. The trees would not give her a second chance. She didn't understand what was wrong with her, didn't know why the trees had not accepted her. She was the daughter of Peter and Estarra, Father and Mother of Theroc ... yet the trees had cast Arita out.

She had sat shuddering on the forest floor, where the weeds and plants now seemed prickly and unwelcoming. She had pulled her knees up to her chest and waited, trying to control her tears. When Collin bounded through the underbrush to find her, calling her name and grinning, she looked up through reddened eyes to see how he had changed: now bald, his skin a beautiful green, and his eyes filled with a new wisdom.

And when he saw her, Arita felt worse than ever. They were supposed to be together, partners, lovers, laughing with the wonder of the forest....

Now among the Whistlers Arita felt a fresh pang of loss. She released her grip on the spiny branch, looked at the blood on her hands. Though feverish and dizzy, she didn't sense anything from the cacti. Their fluting sounds and low tones no longer held the promise of sentience, of shared thoughts. Maybe they were just noises after all.

Or maybe the Whistlers had rejected her too.

Arita staggered away back toward the camp, finding it hard to keep her balance. Her vision was blurred, and her head pounded with the aftereffects of the toxin. This was different from when the worldforest had been inside her brain. Back then, something had altered in her thoughts, something Arita had never understood.

Tonight she merely felt disappointed. No, the Whistlers did not have what she was searching for.

Gradually, as she walked, her breathing grew less labored. The exposure was diminishing. It was deep night by the time she reached her tent. She crawled inside and collapsed, hearing a roar in her ears, listening to the pulse pounding in her temples.

The other research teams were asleep, and Arita wanted to be alone. She lay back, waiting for the night to end. She had finished her work here on Eljiid.

In the morning, she decided it was time to go home to Theroc.