The letters stopped. Through the fog, Kress saw something moving. That was enough for him, that and the word 'Lifeforms' in their advertis.e.m.e.nt. He swept his walking cloak over his shoulder and entered the store.

Inside, Kress felt disoriented. The interior seemed vast, much larger than he would have guessed from the relatively modest frontage. It was dimly lit, peaceful. The ceiling was a starscape, complete with spiral nebulae, very dark and realistic, very nice. The counters all shone faintly, the better to display the merchandise within. The aisles were carpeted with ground fog. In places, it came almost to his knees and swirled about his feet as he walked.

'Can I help you?'

She seemed almost to have risen from the fog. Tall and gaunt and pale, she wore a practical gray jumpsuit and a strange little cap that rested well back on her head.

'Are you Wo or Shade?' Kress asked. 'Or only sales help?'

'Jala Wo, ready to serve you,' she replied. 'Shade does not see customers. We have no sales help.'

'You have quite a large establishment,' Kress said. 'Odd that I have never heard of you before.'

'We have only just opened this shop on Baldur,' the woman said. 'We have franchises on a number of other worlds, however. What can I sell you? Art, perhaps? You have the look of a collector. We have some fine Nor T'alush crystal carvings.'

'No,' Simon Kress said. 'I own all the crystal carvings I desire. I came to see about a pet.'

'A lifeform?'

'Yes.'

'Alien?'

'Of course.'

'We have a mimic in stock. From Celia's World. A clever little simian. Not only will it learn to speak, but eventually it will mimic your voice, inflections, gestures, even facial expressions.'

'Cute,' said Kress. 'And common. I have no use for either, Wo. I want something exotic. Unusual. And not cute. I detest cute animals. At the moment I own a shambler. Imported from Cotho, at no mean expense. From time to time I feed him a litter of unwanted kittens. That is what I think of cute. Do I make myself understood?'

Wo smiled enigmatically. 'Have you ever owned an animal that worshipped you?' she asked.

Kress grinned. 'Oh, now and again. But I don't require worship, Wo. Just entertainment.'

'You misunderstood me,' Wo said, still wearing her strange smile. 'I meant worship literally.'

'What are you talking about?'

'I think I have just the thing for you,' Wo said. 'Follow me.'

She led Kress between the radiant counters and down a long, fog-shrouded aisle beneath false starlight. They pa.s.sed through a wall of mist into another section of the store, and stopped before a large plastic tank. An aquarium, thought Kress.

Wo beckoned. He stepped closer and saw that he was wrong. It was a terrarium. Within lay a miniature desert about two meters square. Pale and bleached scarlet by wan red light. Rocks: basalt and quartz and granite. In each corner of the tank stood a castle.

Kress blinked, and peered, and corrected himself; actually only three castles stood. The fourth leaned; a crumbled, broken ruin. The other three were crude but intact, carved of stone and sand. Over their battlements and through their rounded porticoes, tiny creatures climbed and scrambled. Kress pressed his face against the plastic. 'Insects?' he asked.

'No,' Wo replied. 'A much more complex life-form. More intelligent as well. Considerably smarter than your shambler. They are called sandkings.'

'Insects,' Kress said, drawing back from the tank. 'I don't care how complex they are.' He frowned. 'And kindly don't try to gull me with this talk of intelligence. These things are far too small to have anything but the most rudimentary brains.'

'They share hiveminds,' Wo said. 'Castle minds, in this case. There are only three organisms in the tank, actually. The fourth died. You see how her castle has fallen.'

Kress looked back at the tank. 'Hiveminds, eh? Interesting.' He frowned again. 'Still, it is only an oversized ant farm. I'd hoped for something better.'

'They fight wars.'

'Wars? Hmmm.' Kress looked again.

'Note the colors, if you will,' Wo told him. She pointed to the creatures that swarmed over the nearest castle. One was scrabbling at the tank wall. Kress studied it. It still looked like an insect to his eyes. Barely as long as his fingernail, six-limbed, with six tiny eyes set all around its body. A wicked set of mandibles clacked visibly, while two long, fine antennae wove patterns in the air. Antennae, mandibles, eyes, and legs were sooty black, but the dominant color was the burnt orange of its armor plating. 'It's an insect,' Kress repeated.

'It is not an insect,' Wo insisted calmly. 'The armored exoskeleton is shed when the sandking grows larger. If it grows larger. In a tank this size, it won't.' She took Kress by the elbow and led him around the tank to the next castle. 'Look at the colors here.'

He did. They were different. Here the sandkings had bright red armor; antennae, mandibles, eyes, and legs were yellow. Kress glanced across the tank. The denizens of the third live castle were off-white, with red trim. 'Hmmm,' he said.

'They war, as I said,' Wo told him. 'They even have truces and alliances. It was an alliance that destroyed the fourth castle in this tank. The blacks were getting too numerous, so the others joined forces to destroy them.'

Kress remained unconvinced. 'Amusing, no doubt. But insects fight wars too.' 'Insects do not worship,' Wo said.

'Eh?'

Wo smiled and pointed at the castle. Kress stared. A face had been carved into the wall of the highest tower. He recognized it. It was Jala Wo's face. 'How...?'

'I projected a hologram of my face into the tank, kept it there for a few days. The face of G.o.d, you see? I feed them; I am always close. The sandkings have a rudimentary psionic sense. Proximity telepathy. They sense me, and worship me by using my face to decorate their buildings. All the castles have them, see.' They did.

On the castle, the face of Jala Wo was serene and peaceful, and very lifelike. Kress marveled at the workmanship. 'How do they do it?'

'The foremost legs double as arms. They even have fingers of a sort; three small, flexible tendrils. And they cooperate well, both in building and in battle. Remember, all the mobiles of one color share a single mind.'

'Tell me more,' Kress said.

Wo smiled. 'The maw lives in the castle. Maw is my name for her. A pun, if you will; the thing is mother and stomach both. Female, large as your fist, immobile. Actually, sandking is a bit of a misnomer. The mobiles are peasants and warriors, the real ruler is a queen. But that a.n.a.logy is faulty as well. Considered as a whole, each castle is a single hermaphroditic creature.'

'What do they eat?'

'The mobiles eat pap predigested food obtained inside the castle. They get it from the maw after she has worked on it for several days. Their stomachs can't handle anything else, so if the maw dies, they soon die as well. The maw...the maw eats anything. You'll have no special expense there. Table sc.r.a.ps will do excellently.'

'Live food?' Kress asked.

Wo shrugged. 'Each maw eats mobiles from the other castles, yes.'

'I am intrigued,' he admitted. 'If only they weren't so small.'

'Yours can be larger. These sandkings are small because their tank is small. They seem to limit their growth to fit available s.p.a.ce. If I moved these to a larger tank, they'd start growing again.'

'Hmmmm. My piranha tank is twice this size, and vacant. It could be cleaned out, filled with sand...'

'Wo and Shade would take care of the installation. It would be our pleasure.'

'Of course,' said Kress, 'I would expect four intact castles.'

'Certainly,' Wo said.

They began to haggle about the price.

Three days later Jala Wo arrived at Simon Kress' estate, with dormant sandkings and a work crew to take charge of the installation. Wo's a.s.sistants were aliens unlike any Kress was familiar with squat, broad bipeds with four arms and bulging, multifaceted eyes. Their skin was thick and leathery, twisted into horns and spines and protrusions at odd spots upon their bodies. But they were very strong, and good workers. Wo ordered them about in a musical tongue that Kress had never heard.

In a day it was done. They moved his piranha tank to the center of his s.p.a.cious living room, arranged couches on either side of it for better viewing, scrubbed it clean, and filled it two-thirds of the way up with sand and rock. Then they installed a special lighting system, both to provide the dim red illumination the sandkings preferred and to project holographic images into the tank. On top they mounted a st.u.r.dy plastic cover, with a feeder mechanism built in. 'This way you can feed your sandkings without removing the top of the tank,' Wo explained. 'You would not want to take any chances on the mobiles escaping.'

The cover also included climate control devices, to condense just the right amount of moisture from the air. 'You want it dry, but not too dry,' Wo said.

Finally one of the four-armed workers climbed into the tank and dug deep pits in the four corners. One of his companions handed the dormant maws over to him, removing them one by one from their frosted cryonic traveling cases. They were nothing to look at. Kress decided they resembled nothing so much as a mottled, half-spoiled chunk of raw meat. With a mouth.

The alien buried them, one in each corner of the tank. Then they sealed it all up and took their leave. 'The heat will bring the maws out of dormancy,' Wo said. 'In less than a week, mobiles will begin to hatch and burrow to the surface. Be certain to give them plenty of food. They will need all their strength until they are well established. I would estimate that you will have castles rising in about three weeks.'

'And my face? When will they carve my face?'

'Turn on the hologram after about a month,' she advised him. 'And be patient. If you have any questions, please call. Wo and Shade are at your service.' She bowed and left.

Kress wandered back to the tank and lit a joystick. The desert was still and empty. He drummed his fingers impatiently against the plastic, and frowned.

On the fourth day, Kress thought he glimpsed motion beneath the sand, subtle subterranean stirrings.

On the fifth day, he saw his first mobile, a lone white.

On the sixth day, he counted a dozen of them, whites and reds and blacks. The oranges were tardy. He cycled through a bowl of half-decayed table sc.r.a.ps. The mobiles sensed it at once, rushed to it, and began to drag pieces back to their respective corners. Each color group was very organized. They did not fight. Kress was a bit disappointed, but he decided to give them time.

The oranges made their appearance on the eighth day. By then the other sandkings had begun to carry small stones and erect crude fortifications. They still did not war. At the moment they were only half the size of those he had seen at Wo and Shade's, but Kress thought they were growing rapidly.

The castles began to rise midway through the second week. Organized battalions of mobiles dragged heavy chunks of sandstone and granite to their corners, where other mobiles were pushing sand into place with mandibles and tendrils. Kress had purchased a pair of magnifying goggles so he could watch them work, wherever they might go in the tank. He wandered around and around the tall plastic walls, observing. It was fascinating. The castles were a bit plainer than Kress would have liked, but he had an idea about that. The next day he cycled through some obsidian and flakes of colored gla.s.s along with the food. Within hours, they had been incorporated into the castle walls.

The black castle was the first completed, followed by the white and red fortresses. The oranges were last, as usual. Kress took his meals into the living room and ate seated on the couch, so he could watch. He expected the first war to break out any hour now.

He was disappointed. Days pa.s.sed; the castles grew taller and more grand, and Kress seldom left the tank except to attend to his sanitary needs and answer critical business calls. But the sandkings did not war. He was getting upset.

Finally, he stopped feeding them.

Two days after the table sc.r.a.ps had ceased to fall from their desert sky, four black mobiles surrounded an orange and dragged it back to their maw. They maimed it first, ripping off its mandibles and antennae and limbs, and carried it through the shadowed main gate of their miniature castle. It never emerged. Within an hour, more than forty orange mobiles marched across the sand and attacked the blacks' corner. They were outnumbered by the blacks that came rushing up from the depths. When the fighting was over, the attackers had been slaughtered. The dead and dying were taken down to feed the black maw.

Kress, delighted, congratulated himself on his genius.

When he put food into the tank the following day, a three-cornered battle broke out over its possession. The whites were the big winners. After that, war followed war.

Almost a month to the day after Jala Wo had delivered the sandkings, Kress turned on the hologram projector, and his face materialized in the tank. It turned, slowly, around and around so his gaze fell on all four castles equally. Kress thought it rather a good likeness it had his impish grin, wide mouth, full cheeks. His blue eyes sparkled, his gray hair was carefully arrayed in a fashionable sidesweep, his eye-brows were thin and sophisticated.

Soon enough, the sandkings set to work. Kress fed them lavishly while his image beamed down at them from their sky. Temporarily, the wars stopped. All activity was directed towards worship.

His face emerged on the castle walls.

At first all four carvings looked alike to him, but as the work continued and Kress studied the reproductions, he began to detect subtle differences in technique and execution. The reds were the most creative, using tiny flakes of slate to put the gray in his hair. The white idol seemed young and mischievous to him, while the face shaped by the blacks although virtually the same, line for line struck him as wise and beneficent. The orange sandkings, as ever, were last and least. The wars had not gone well for them, and their castle was sad compared to the others. The image they carved was crude and cartoonish, and they seemed to intend to leave it that way. When they stopped work on the face, Kress grew quite piqued with them, but there was really nothing he could do.

When all the sandkings had finished their Kress-faces, he turned off the hologram and decided that it was time to have a party. His friends would be impressed. He could even stage a war for them, he thought. Humming happily to himself, he began to draw up a guest list.

The party was a wild success.

Kress invited thirty people: a handful of close friends who shared his amus.e.m.e.nts, a few former lovers, and a collection of business and social rivals who could not afford to ignore his summons. He knew some of them would be discomfited and even offended by his sandkings. He counted on it. Simon Kress customarily considered his parties a failure unless at least one guest walked out in high dudgeon.

On impulse he added Jala Wo's name to his list. 'Bring Shade if you like,' he added when dictating her invitation.

Her acceptance surprised him just a bit. 'Shade, alas, will be unable to attend. He does not go to social functions,' Wo added. 'As for myself, I look forward to the chance to see how your sandkings are doing.'

Kress ordered them up a sumptuous meal. And when at last the conversation had died down, and most of his guests had gotten silly on wine and joysticks, he shocked them by personally sc.r.a.ping their table leavings into a large bowl. 'Come, all of you,' he told them. 'I want to introduce you to my newest pets.' Carrying the bowl, he conducted them into his living room.

The sandkings lived up to his fondest expectations. He had starved them for two days in preparation, and they were in a fighting mood. While the guests ringed the tank, looking through the magnifying gla.s.ses Kress had thoughtfully provided, the sandkings waged a glorious battle over the sc.r.a.ps. He counted almost sixty dead mobiles when the struggle was over. The reds and whites, who had recently formed an alliance, emerged with most of the food.

'Kress, you're disgusting,' Cath m'Lane told him. She had lived with him for a short time two years before, until her soppy sentimentality almost drove him mad. 'I was a fool to come back here. I thought perhaps you'd changed, wanted to apologize.' She had never forgiven him for the time his shambler had eaten an excessively cute puppy of which she had been fond. 'Don't ever invite me here again, Simon.' She strode out, accompanied by her current lover and a chorus of laughter.

His other guests were full of questions.

Where did the sandkings come from? they wanted to know. 'From Wo and Shade, Importers,' he replied, with a polite gesture towards Jala Wo, who had remained quiet and apart through most of the evening.

Why did they decorate their castles with his likeness? 'Because I am the source of all good things. Surely you know that?' That brought a round of chuckles.

Will they fight again? 'Of course, but not tonight. Don't worry. There will be other parties.'

Jad Rakkis, who was an amateur xenologist, began talking about other social insects and the wars they fought. 'These sandkings are amusing, but nothing really. You ought to read about Terran soldier ants, for instance.'

'Sandkings are not insects,' Jala Wo said sharply, but Jad was off and running, and no one paid her the slightest attention. Kress smiled at her and shrugged.

Malada Blane suggested a betting pool the next time they got together to watch a war, and everyone was taken with the idea. An animated discussion about rules and odds ensued. It lasted for almost an hour. Finally the guests began to take their leave.

Jala Wo was the last to depart. 'So,' Kress said to her when they were alone, 'it appears my sandkings are a hit.'

'They are doing well,' Wo said. 'Already they are larger than my own.'

'Yes,' Kress said, 'except for the oranges.'

'I had noticed that,' Wo replied. 'They seem few in number, and their castle is shabby.'

'Well, someone must lose,' Kress said. 'The oranges were late to emerge and get established. They have suffered for it.'

'Pardon,' said Wo, 'but might I ask if you are feeding your sandkings sufficiently?'

Kress shrugged. 'They diet from time to time. It makes them fiercer.'

She frowned. 'There is no need to starve them. Let them war in their own time, for their own reasons. It is their nature, and you will witness conflicts that are delightfully subtle and complex. The constant war brought on by hunger is artless and degrading.'

Simon Kress repaid Wo's frown with interest. 'You are in my house, Wo, and here I am the judge of what is degrading. I fed the sandkings as you advised, and they did not fight.'

'You must have patience.'