"Yes, friend Zakodny. That we will."

The forests of Metaneira are among the most lovely in the entire Universal Song. They cover two-thirds of the land with a living carpet of simple-minded trees who sing not only with the Inner Voice, but also with sound, so that every breeze wafts a gentle harmony through the warm air.

We ground in a large clearing atop a squat hill; Fadil Tormity's landing is so gentle that it does not snap even the smallest branch. Each of us steps out of the ship, then we stand together, transfixed by the music and the rich earthy smells of a brand-new world.

"Where do we find the Virgans?" whispers the geneticist, Osteva Rul.

They, a telepath answers, will find us.

My sister and I are content to stand, feeling the infinite subtlety of alien soil beneath and around bare feet, hearing the eternal pulse of life's inner song beat around us. After the long journey in Virgo Mariner's hold, it is a relief once again to see real sunlight and feel unfettered wind. If only, I think, my sister and I could root ourselves here! Metaneira is a completely unfamiliar world, with an ecology and biosphere totally strange to us; it would take a forest of Hlutr Human millennia to come to an understanding and appreciation of the planet's myriad subtleties.

The longer we stand, the more we see. These soaring trees, these thick vines and airy filaments that stretch between them, the just-glimpsed movement of shy creatures as in endless columned halls- all begin to resolve themselves into a greater pattern. I feel surprise and awe blossom in the minds of my companions, as one by one they come to the same realization: the forest follows some ancient pattern, interleaved ovals ranged around the hill on which we stand, as if grown on the ruins of some even more ancient architecture.

The trees sing of lost times, and just for an instant I glimpse a great city of eons past, itself built up from structures even older.

There is movement in the forest, a quick and almost-imperceptible movement that blends with shifting shadows and the rustle of leaves; were I present in my Hlutr body I could not miss it, but it takes Human senses longer to notice the ma.s.sing of dozens of strange, alien forms in the wood.

They are arrived, whispers the telepath.

In the Scattered Worlds, the different types of life are nearly numberless: nine times seventy times itself and more. And we Hlutr are familiar with all these kinds of Little Ones. This familiarity is bred in our genes, it is sung in concert across the Galaxy, it follows us wherever we go. Even when a lifeform is totally unknown to us, at first sight and smell, instantly and effortlessly, we know its place in the scheme of life.

Not so on Metaneira.

The Virgans move toward us in a slow polonaise, accompanied by the hushed music of the trees, and I do not know what they are. Faintly vegetable yet animate, all dissimilar, they are a mystery to my senses. Some are like Hlutr saplings, some like the small predators of Tcherlatha, others like the Dawn People of Sebya. Most are like all these, and more.

What shape is the wind, or the stream? What form has the inexorable creep of time, or the heart of the summer storm? These were the Virgans...these and many others beside.

One of them approaches, one who perhaps is somewhat less strange than its companions. It stands before us, then speaks in perfectly accented, though slightly archaic, Coruman: "The Twilight Dancers bid fair welcome to our friends and cousins of the Scattered Worlds."

Mal Arin answers, speaker for us all. "Fair welcome bid indeed, to speak our tongue. Where hast thou learned the language of our folk?"

"A child of ours, Jel Haran, once did fly and sojourn long amid your distant stars. When briefly he returned unto his home, he told us of your ways and of your tales. His love, fair Lirith, did instruct a few to speak your tongue, that we might understand the databanks that they had brought along."

"We are grateful for your friendship and your words- for we have traveled far through lonely s.p.a.ce, and are refreshed by kindly fellowship."

One or two among our team are not versed in the Ancient Speech; the machines have been translating for them. A tall, slender Virgan listens, then says, "Perhaps not all among you comprehend our words. Might we invoke another tongue?"

"Our current speech is ceremonial; I fear you do not know our common tongue." Mal Arin lifts one of the small translaters. "These cast our words into Imperial."

The first Virgan reaches forth a limb, at the same time exuding a pungent scent of curiosity. "Permission to examine this device?"

The Captain hands it over instantly. Two Virgans converge on the one who holds the device, and together the three of them raise it high.

Music, which has whispered constantly in the background, rises now and for a few instants I almost feel that I am listening to the concert of the Hlutr- but listening from outside, as a Little One would, hearing the melody but missing the meaning. Before my sister and I can but grasp the barest seeds of that marvelous song, it is over.

The Virgan returns the machine to Mal Arin, then speaks in the flat tones of Human language. "If this mode of speech will make you feel more welcome, then we shall use it."

Zakodny shakes her head. "How did you do that?"

"We consulted the translater's dictionary. It contains full definitions and linguistic equivalents for the Imperial standard vocabulary, plus grammar and usage guides."

Osteva Rul, the youngest of us here, glances at her own translater. "You're trying to tell us that you absorbed over two gigabits in the s.p.a.ce of a few seconds?"

"Child, it required but a thousandth of a second for us to read the dictionary. Fully understanding its information took far longer."

"But you did that without instruments "

Mal Arin raises a hand, silencing her. "I'm sure we can discuss information retrieval later. First, there is much else to learn."

"Indeed." The Virgan folds in upon himself, then expands to his full size. "In your language, we call ourselves the Twilight Dancers. My own name means 'Song of the Eventide Wind'. Your vessel was detected in the central galaxy, and I received the message; so it is my happy duty to be your host. Any of my fellows can help you as well as I but should you wish to see me directly, simply speak my name on the breeze. I will hear, and come to you." He laughs, and his laugh is the sweet taste of spring rain. "Now tell me your names, and of your interests."

We go from one to the other, and my sister and I go last. "We are the Hlutr, and we bring greetings from the Eldest of us all to Her cousins in the Great Ring of Stars." Unexpected and unbidden, a tremendous song blossoms within us, and we cast it forth on the waves of the Inner Voice. Until this moment, neither of us knew that we carried this message from the Eldest- even now we do not know exactly what it says.

The being called Song of the Eventide Wind laughs again, and answers in a song that is both like and unlike the Hlutr Inner Voice: "Brother and Sister, you gladden us, that once again we hear the song of this youth, this cousin, whom we feared lost forever."

Youth? The Eldest?

"I see that you are all perplexed. Osteva, so many questions beat in your mind that you cannot decide which to ask. Even my friends the Hlutr are disconcerted."

"No easy feat," mutters Fadil Tormity.

Song of the Eventide Wind shows no sign of hearing. "We have made ready to answer your questions. Will you come with us?"

Mal Arin nods.

We walk in the direction of the pale red sun, and the Twilight Dancers walk with us. They move elegantly, in great patterns whose complexity is lost on us. At first, nothing changes...then slowly, gently, the wind rises and stirs the trees about us.

The wind is the music, and the music is the dance. And the dance...the dance is that which alters the forest itself. First only a flicker on the edge of sight, a leaf changing color or the swift blossoming of a bright bloom then a shift of limbs, a movement of roots, a slow descent of ground or the swelling of a hillock. Soon the entire forest is in flux, and the Twilight Dancers move in, out and around us as if unconscious in the progression of a stately gavotte. Only Song of the Eventide Wind remains constant, a few steps before Mal Arin.

The dance slows, the music diminishes, and the wind becomes the merest touch of breeze. And we are within a temple.

I cannot call it else. For all that we are surrounded by sky, trees and the living folk of the forest, we are within a sacred place- there can be no doubt that each of us feels the solemnity of this sudden grove.

Song of the Eventide Wind faces us, and raises his many limbs. "I must beg your indulgence for a bit of a story. When it is over, each of you may accompany some of my folk to learn more, or you may return to your vessel, or you may stay and tell us your own stories. But I think you will find these essentials interesting enough to justify your great journey."

He waves, and suddenly we are swimming in the dark of endless s.p.a.ce. Shocked, I withdraw for an instant to my place on Virgo Mariner's mid-decks. All is well, the Humans' artificial sun burns bright. What occurs on Metaneira, then, is but illusion.

The dark is lit by tiny, intense points of light. We approach one of them and it swells, burning with a fierce inner fire.

"Fifteen billion years ago was the age of the quasars. Instruments have shown us a frightening h.e.l.l of radiation, and few elements beyond simple hydrogen and helium; no life of our sort could have existed then. Only when the quasars cooled, becoming galaxies, would our kind of life be possible."

The bright spot fades, expands, and takes on a familiar spiral structure. From nowhere, I hear Doctor na-Pekah gasp in delight.

"Five billion years pa.s.sed- the lifetimes of generations of hot blue stars- before third- and fourth-generation planetary systems formed with enough carbon, oxygen and nitrogen for the chemistry of life. Larger, more violent galaxies were favored spots."

Now the spiral became more cloudy, developing a larger nucleus and more scattered stars in the periphery. "Our home galaxy was both large and violent. Life began on our homeworld ten eons ago...long before most of your planets had even formed."

The galaxy expands, clouds resolve into single stars, and then a lovely yellow sun swims in crowded s.p.a.ce before us. Around it is a tiny, dark world.

"The million dying suns in our galaxy's core drove biological evolution at a frantic pace. False starts abounded, but finally replicating molecules grew strong enough to resist destruction, while flexible enough to change. You are all familiar with the progress of simple compounds to cells to photosynthesis to oxygen-breathing life- the process which alters forever the very atmosphere of a world."

The dark planet turned the achingly beautiful blue of winter dawn. "Three billion years pa.s.sed before intelligence touched my planet. In one-thousandth that time, we had left our planetary cradle."

Too fast to comprehend, impressions rushed by- a strange evolution, forms part animal and part plant, strange technologies and stranger customs. Then the first leap into s.p.a.ce, which many believe is the first note in the symphony of racial maturity.

"We were not the Twilight Dancers then...we were Aurora's Children, and we delighted in the the wonderful universe around us. We explored our galaxy, on lovely ships that sailed the winds of s.p.a.ce, and watched ten thousand races re-create our story. They became one with us. Together we searched nearby galaxies, eventually probed the entirety of what you call the Virgo Cl.u.s.ter...and nowhere else did we find life. There had not been enough time."

Images faded; we had never left the glade. Song of the Eventide Wind drooped a little, and his voice carried the chill of almost-forgotten sadness. "We have charted two hundred thirty-seven billion galaxies in the Universe, each with potentially billions of worlds. We had not yet discovered the stardrive which moves your vessel so effortlessly through s.p.a.ce: plainly, we could not explore each of those billions in search of fellow sapients- any civilization we sought would be dead long before we reached it."

Osteva Rul opens her mouth, then shuts it. Again our host laughs.

"You are all ahead of me, of course. Why leave our home, when we could cast our inner senses out to find the song of life? But the distances are stupefying, the emanations of life so faint in a universe of quasars and million-sun collapsars. We would have to have delicate minds indeed. So we set about developing them, retreated into ourselves and allowed our galaxy-spanning empire to decline...the first of many such declines."

Sister, is what he says possible?

(The possibility is there, brother. We Hlutr have chosen a different path for our Little Ones.) "I shan't bore you with the story of a billion years of mental evolution. Nor does it matter- for long before we reached our objective, we found life in a most unexpected place: a young dwarf spiral on the very fringes of our cl.u.s.ter, one we had given only cursory examination. Your own galaxy. This was six billion years ago as you count time."

Wu Plenr, who carries a store of information from the Temple of Worlds on Nephestal, and whose knowledge of Scattered Worlds history is legendary, gives a snort. "You are off by a million millennia. Sapient life did not appear on Paka Tel and Verkorra until "

"Six billion years ago," Song of the Eventide Wind repeats. "In a lightsail ship, some eight hundred of Aurora's Children set out for your home stars."

"Seventy million lightyears? Ridiculous."

Debrettar, our quiet Iaranori Chief Engineer, nods his large round head. "Not so, my lord Wu Plenr. My own ancestors dispatched exploration vessels to other galaxies long before we found the tachyon drive. That was six hundred million years ago. Some have still not reached their destinations. I pray the Elder G.o.ds that their crews sleep on forever, or have flown the path to eternal peace."

"I will not try to pretend that my folk endured the journey easily. They reached your galaxy only after great sacrifice, and with virtually no hope of returning to their homes. They were volunteers, and like Debrettar's people I believe they slept most of the way."

"That's still too early for sapient life in- oh...."

"Exactly, Wu Plenr. We had not found sapient animals, nor the sapient plants who were to come. What we had heard was the endless, slow song of the crystalline intelligences who circle in the cold interstellar reaches of your Milky Way: the creatures you call Talebba."

I have sung with the Talebba, living so slowly that seasons race past like buzzing insects and the stars are solid bars of light in the turning sky. Their song is alien, and they do not often concern themselves with the dealings of we whom they call the Soft Ones. For Aurora's Children to have come so far, only to find the Talebba, was an ironic joke.

"I will spare you the anguish, the loneliness of those lost explorers. I am sorry, I do not know the name of the one who found a way to turn their defeat into victory. They had come to find sapient life, you see- and if they could not find it, they must needs make it."

I feel my sister's thought, as she carries Song of the Eventide Wind's story to its conclusion.

Stars above, no. It could not be.

But they called the Eldest a youth . . ..

Do the Hlutr know?

"Our bodies were half vegetable already, and even then my folk had well-developed genetic skills. They found a world whose life had progressed to photosynthesis and beyond, where a number of plants had already blossomed in barren soil. From their own genes they gave the gift of the Inner Voice, and from the genius of desperation they gave an even greater gift: the ability to do as they had done, to alter the genetics of their world...."

Mal Arin is white, Osteva Rul quivers like a frightened infant, and even Zakodny reels. But none can close their eyes to the image that rises before them, the image of what Aurora's Children fashioned in the wastes of our early Galaxy.

The image of one of my ancestors. A primitive Hlut.

Metaneira's day is nearly fifty Human hours long. It is a convenient period for crew meetings, so the Captain has decreed a breakfast symposium on the mid-decks every Metaneiran morning. Not everyone attends every session; yet in the course of three tendays virtually every specialist has given some report of his discoveries.

One of our poets, a Human called LeMoine, is constructing an epic in Coruman, an epic which tells what we know of the story of the Twilight Dancers. This morning, LeMoine sings us the final verses of his work.

Song of the Eventide Wind left out much when he told us the history of his folk, and LeMoine's song skips quickly over the parts we do not know. "We cannot tell you everything that we found in this vast and glorious Universe," Song of the Eventide Wind explained, "Else we would spoil your own fun." Some of the crew, I sense, would rather have had the fun spoiled.

We were told that the Virgans experienced sixteen great enlightenments, and suffered nine great collapses of their civilization. LeMoine sings of the last of these, which started eighty million years ago when the core of the central Virgan galaxy exploded, sending forth deadly bolts of dying starstuff that poisoned the whole starcloud. Leaving behind their ruins, the Virgans sought refuge on the far side of the cl.u.s.ter, and centered their realm in the Ring Galaxy.

The story of Jel Haran and Lirith, a long and powerful tale, is but a footnote to the ongoing decline of the Virgans. Twenty million years ago their power and majesty were far beyond anything Lirith had ever seen in the Scattered Worlds. Five million years ago, when grand Aveth.e.l.l ruled our home stars, the Virgans had withdrawn to the Ring Galaxy alone.

By the time Doctor na-Pekah's people rose to their greatness and Dorasc was chief among the Scattered Worlds, the folk of Virgo had found their sixteenth enlightenment, and became the Twilight Dancers.

Abandoning most of the Ring, they moved onto a few planets of red dwarf stars- stars like Metaneira's sun, which would burn for thirty times seventy billion years. There they would stay, Song of the Eventide Wind told us, living ever slower as they pondered the Universe and dreamed of eternity.

The last notes of LeMoine's song still echo in this great chamber, when Osteva Rul steps out of the dropshaft. "Very nice," she says, "But I don't believe it for an instant."

She strides to an empty couch next to Mal Arin, stretches, and reclines. At once a Human robot glides to her side with a tray of foods. Belatedly, Osteva raises her eyes to the Captain. "Sorry I'm late. I've been in Genetics all night, testing samples."

Mal Arin smiles and in his mind, his love for Osteva is mixed with the sort of indulgence one shows a bright child. "You're forgiven." They kiss, then Osteva bends her attention to her meal.

"Begging your pardon, Madam," LeMoine says, "But why do you say you don't believe my tale?"

"Oh, your tale is fine," Osteva mumbles around a sweetroll. "I just doubt that the Twilight Dancers are going to settle in and dream for the rest of eternity." She frowns. "I'm not even sure how much I trust the rest of their story."

"What do you mean?"

"We haven't been told everything. Far from it. You see, I've taken samples from the trees, the small animals, the Twilight Dancers themselves- and my instruments tell me that their biochemistry is a thousand times more complex than any we've experienced in the Milky Way."

My sister is interested; in Human language, she says, "What have you found, Little One?"

"For one thing, the Twilight Dancers don't have a single biological form as our races do. Everything plants, animals, even the micro-organisms are all types of what we think of as 'The Twilight Dancers.'"

"One visiting a Human world for the first time might come to the same conclusion. Life is intertwined."

"Not to this degree." With a studied calm, she finishes her last bite and then says, "Does anyone know that each of the Twilight Dancers can alter his own genetic structure at will?"

There is a sudden silence. Then Ximu Qin, a Daamin geneticist, rises. "I must your results see. This is unprecendented."

Osteva produces her computer, unrolls the terminal and spreads it flat on a table. Ximu Qin studies the display as Osteva taps silently on the keypad. Then she shakes her head. "The Human is right. I know not any race with this ability."

"The archives tell of none," says Wu Plenr. "Do the Hlutr know of any?"

My sister contemplates, then answers, "Some of the Aakad da'Estra have used their science to perform genetic alterations on themselves. The Dareta h'Lamoth and the Folk of the Thousand Suns could shape the development of their children to a certain extent. The Children of Lost Time, the Minstrel Fish of Jasenifora and the Grand Starwoods of Ziparque all managed species evolution by force of will. Humans, of course, have practiced gengineering on seventies upon seventies of species, including Dogs and Cats as well as nonsapient domestic animals and plants. The Hlutr retain the ability to alter our own genetics as well as that of other races."

Osteva dismisses all with a wave. "Pikers. I've seen a Twilight Dancer change from one form to another in the s.p.a.ce of a tenday. That's far beyond the ability of any Scattered Worlds race."

Mal Arin nods, his inner song radiating satisfaction with her, with himself. He drops into Coruman for a moment. "My friends and fellow seekers after truth, I counsel that we all investigate the consequences of this startling news." Then, back in Human language, he says, "During the next few symposia we'll share our results. Osteva, will you make your data available to all?"

"Of course." She touches his hand, then yawns. "I've been up all night, and I'm tired. Before I go to sleep, though, I want to submit the following for discussion: This revelation changes the nature of our mission. I propose that we establish a permanent research station on Metaneira, then send Virgo Mariner back to the Scattered Worlds with some of the Twilight Dancers. I know that many of my colleagues on Telorbat and Ptyra will want to study them, and I'm sure that most of you can say the same." She spreads her arms. "This is a shattering discovery. Think of what we might be able to do with such knowledge."