Sara glanced back toward the moonlit pool.

Did you hear any of that, Blade? Were you asleep? Was it a garbled blur of uncertain noise?

Anyway, what good could a lone blue qheuen do, in the middle of a parched plain? His best bet was to stay by the pond till help came.

A mutter of beasts lifted behind Sara as the second party got under way, more slowly, following the same path.

Makes sense. The larger bunch will trample the trail of the smaller. At some point, UrKachu will veer us off, letting any pursuers keep following the main party.

Soon they were alone on the high steppe. Urunthai trotted alongside, agile and contemptuous of the awkward humans, who winced, dragging their toes as they rode. In reaction, the men began taking turns sliding off their mounts to run at a steady lope for several arrow-flights before swinging back aboard. This shut up the derisive urs and also seemed a good way to avoid saddle sores.

Alas, Sara knew she was in no physical condition to try it. If I live through this, I'm definitely getting into shape, she thought, not.for the first time.

The man with slate eyes ran next to Sara for a few duras, sparing her a wry, eloquent smile^He was so wiry and strong, it amazed Sara that she recognized him. The last time she had seen Savant Dedinger, he was a pale intellectual with a middle-aged paunch, an expert on the most ancient scrolls, and author of a text Sara carried in her own slim luggage. A man once honored with status and trust, till his orthodox fanaticism grew too extreme for even the broad-minded High Council.

These days, the sages preached a complex faith of divided loyalty, split evenly between Jijo, on the one hand, and the ancestors' outlaw plan, on the other. It was a tense trade-off. Some solved it by choosing one allegiance over the other.

Sara's brother gave his full devotion to the planet. Lark saw wisdom and justice in the billion-year-old Galactic ecological codes. To him, no fancied "path of redemption" could ever make up for flouting those rules.

Dedinger took the opposite extreme. He cared little about ecology or species preservation, only the racial deliverance promised by the Scrolls. Seeking pure innocence as a way to better days. Perhaps he also saw in this crisis a way to regain lost honors.

By moonlight, Sara watched the banished sage move with wiry grace-alert, focused, powerful-living testimony for the simpler style that he preached.

Deceptively simple, she thought. The world has countless ways of not being quite as it seems.

The Urunthai slowed after a while, then stopped to rest and eat. Those with pouched husbands or larvae needed warm Simla blood every midura or so, although the human raiders chafed and complained, preferring a steady pace over the urrish fashion of hurry-and-relax.

Soon after the second of these breaks, UrKachu veered the party onto a stony ledge that extended roughly southeast like the backbone of some fossilized behemoth. Rougher terrain slowed the pace, and Sara took advantage to dismount, giving respite to the donkey and her own bottom. Exercise might also take some chill stiffness out of her joints. She kept her right arm on the saddle though, in case some unseen stone made her stumble in the dark.

The going went a little easier with second moonrise. Backlit by silvery Torgen, the mountains seemed to loom larger than ever. North-side glaciers drank the satellite's angled light, giving back a peculiar blue luminance.

The Stranger sang for a while, a sweet, soft melody that made Sara think of loneliness.

I am a bar'n island, apart in the desult sea, and the nearest skein of land is my stark thought o' thee.

O' say I were a chondrite, tumblin' sool an' free, would you be my garner-boat?

An' come to ama.s.s me?

It was Anglic, though of a dialect Sara had never heard, with many strange words. It was problematical how much the star-man still grasped. Still, the unrolling verses doubtless roused strong feelings in his mind.

Am I the ice that slakes your thirst, that twinkles your bright rings?

You are the fantoom angel-kin, whose kiss gives planets wings . . .

The recital ended when UrKachu trotted back, nostril flaring, to complain about unbearable Earthling caterwauling. A purely personal opinion, Sara felt, since none of the other urs seemed to mind. Music was on the short list of things the two races tended to agree about. Some urs even said that, for bringing the violus to Jijo, they could almost overlook human stench.

For an auntie, UrKachu seemed a particularly irritable sort.

The man from s.p.a.ce fell silent, and the group traveled in a moody hush, punctuated by the clip-clop of the animals' hooves on bare stone.

The next blood-stop took place on the wind-sheltered lee side of some towering slabs that might be natural rock forms but in the dimness seemed like ruins of an ancient fortress, toppled in a long-ago calamity. One of the weathered desert-men gave Sara a chunk of gritty bread, plus a slab of bushcow cheese that was stale, but tasty enough to one who found herself ravenously hungry. The water ration was disappointing, though. The urs saw little point in carrying much.

Around midnight, the party had to ford a wide, shallow stream that flowed through a desert wadi. Always prepared, Ulgor slipped on sealed booties, crossing with dry feet. The other urrish rebels slogged alongside the humans and animals, then dried each other's legs with rags. After that, the Urunthai seemed eager to run for a while, till the moisture wicked out of their fibrous ankle fur.

When the pace slackened again, Sara slid off her mount to walk. Soon a low voice spoke from her right.

"I meant to tell you-I've read your paper on linguistic devolution from Indo-European."

It was the scholar-turned-hunter, Dedinger, striding beyond her donkey's other flank. She watched him for a long moment before answering.

"I'm surprised. At fifty pages, I could afford to get only five photocopies cranked, and I kept one."

Dedinger smiled. "I still have friends in Biblos who send me engaging items, now and then. As for your thesis., while I enjoyed your ideas about grammatical reinforcement in pre-literate trading clans, I'm afraid I can't bring myself to accept your general theory."

Sara didn't find it surprising. Her conclusions ran counter to everything the man believed in.

"That's the way of science-a cycle of give-and-take. No dogmatic truth. No rigid, received word."

"As opposed to my own slavish devotion to a few ancient scrolls that no human had a hand in writing?" The flinty man laughed. "I guess what it comes down to is which direction you think people are heading. Even among conservative Galactics, science is about slowly improving your models of the world. It's future-oriented. Your children will know more than you do, so the truth you already have can never be called 'perfect.'

"That's fine when your destiny lies upward, Sara. But tradition and a firm creed are preferable if you're embarked on the narrow, sacred road downhill, to salvation. In that case, argument and uncertainty will only confuse your flock."

"Your flock doesn't seem confused," she acknowledged.

He smiled. "I've had some success winning these hard men over to true orthodoxy. They dwell much of each year on the Plain of Sharp Sand, trapping the wild spike-sloths that lurk in caves, under the dunes. Most don't read or write, and their few tools are handmade, so they were already far down the Path. It may prove harder convincing some other groups."

"Like the Explosers Guild?"

The former scholar nodded.

"An enigmatic clan. Their hesitation to do their duty, during this crisis, is disturbing."

Sara raised her eyes toward Kurt and Jomah. While the senior exploser snored atop an ambling donkey, his nephew held another one-sided conversation with the Stranger, who smiled and nodded as Jomah chattered. The star-man made an ideal, uncritical audience for a shy boy, just beginning to express himself.

"Maybe they figure they can blow it all up just once," Sara commented. "Then they'll have to scratch for a living, like everyone else."

Dedinger grunted. "If so, it's time someone reminded them, respectfully, of their obligations."

She recalled Jop's talk of taking Kurt somewhere to be "persuaded." In more violent times, the expression carried chilling implications.

We may be headed back to such times.

The flinty insurgent shook his head.

"But never mind all that. I really want to discuss your fascinating paper. Do you mind?"

When Sara shrugged, Dedinger continued in an amiable tone, as if they sat in a Biblos faculty lounge.

"You admit that proto-Indo-European, and many other human mother tongues, were more rigorous and rational than the dialects that evolved out of them. Right so far?"

"According to books carried here by the Tabernacle. All we have is inherited data."

"And yet you don't see this trend as an obvious sign of decay from perfection? From original grammars designed for our use by a patron race?"

She sighed. There might be weirder things in the universe than holding an abstract chat with her kidnapper under a desert sky, but none came to mind.

"The structure of those early tongues could have risen out of selective pressure, operating over generations. Primitive people need rigid grammars, because they lack writing or other means to correct error and linguistic drift."

"Ah yes. Your a.n.a.logy to the game of Telephone, in which the language with the highest level of shaman coding-"

"That's Shannon coding. Claude Shannon showed that any message can carry within itself the means to correct errors that creep in during transit. In a spoken language, this redundancy often comes embedded in grammatical rules-the cases, declensions, modifiers, and such. It's all quite basic information theory."

"Ffm. Maybe for you. I confess that I failed to follow your mathematics." Dedinger chuckled dryly. "But let's a.s.sume you're right about that. Does not such clever, self-correcting structure prove those early human languages were shrewdly designed?"

"Not at all. The same argument was raised against biological evolution-and later against the notion of self-bootstrapped intelligence. Some folks have a hard time accepting that complexity can emerge out of Darwinian selection, but it does."

"So you believe-"

"That the same thing happened to preliterate languages on Earth. Cultures with stronger grammars could hang together over greater distances and times. According to some of the old-timer linguists, Indo-European may have ranged all the way from Europe to Central Asia. Its rigid perfection maintained culture and trade links over distances far beyond what any person might traverse in a lifetime. News, gossip, or a good story could travel slowly, by word of mouth, all the way across a continent, arriving centuries later, barely changed."

"Like in the game of Telephone."

"That's the general idea."

Sara found herself leaning on the donkey as fatigue p.r.i.c.kled her calves and thighs. Still, it seemed a toss-up-aching muscles if she stayed afoot versus shivering on a bruised coccyx if she remounted. For the little donkey's sake, she chose to keep walking.

Dedinger had his teeth in the argument.

"If all you say is true, how can you deny those early grammars were superior to the shabby, disorganized dialects that followed?"

"What do you mean, 'superior'? Whether you're talking about proto-Indo-European, proto-Bantu or proto-Semitic, each language served the needs of a conservative, largely changeless culture of nomads and herders, for hundreds or thousands of years. But those needs shifted when our ancestors acquired agriculture, metals, and writing. Progress changed the very notion of what language was for."

An expression of earnest confusion briefly softened the man's etched features.

"Pray, what could language be for, if not to maintain a culture's cohesion and foster communication?"

That was the question posed by members of Ded-inger's former department, who spurned Sara's theory at its first hearing, embarra.s.sing her in front of Sages Bon-ner, Taine, and Purofsky. Had not the majestic civilization of the Five Galaxies been refining its twenty or so standard codes since the days of the fabled Progenitors, with a single goal-to promote clear exchange of meaning among myriad citizen races?

"There is another desirable thing," Sara replied. "Another product of language, just as important, in the long run, as cohesion."

"And that is?"

"Creativity. If I'm right, it calls for a different kind of grammar. A completely different way of looking at error."

"One that welcomes error. Embraces it." Dedinger nodded. "This part of your paper I had trouble following. You say Anglic is better because it lacks redundancy coding. Because errors and ambiguity creep into every phrase or paragraph. But how can chaos engender inventiveness?"

"By shattering preconceptions. By allowing illogical, preposterous, even obviously wrong statements to pa.r.s.e in reasonable-sounding expressions. Like the paradox- This sentence is a lie'-which can't be spoken grammatically in any formal Galactic tongue. By putting manifest contradictions on an equal footing with the most time-honored and widely held a.s.sumptions, we are tantalized, confused. Our thoughts stumble out of step."

"This is good?"

"It's how creativity works, especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original-some absurd concept that future generations will a.s.sume to have been 'obvious' all along.

"One result has been a profusion of new words-a vocabulary vastly greater than ancient languages. Words for new things, new ideas, new ways of comparing and reasoning."

Dedinger muttered, "And new disasters. New misunderstandings."

Sara nodded, conceding the point.

"It's a dangerous process. Earth's b.l.o.o.d.y past shows how imagination and belief turn into curses unless they're accompanied by critical judgment. Writing, logic, and experimentation help replace some of the error-correction that used to come embedded in grammar. Above all, mature people must consider that most unpleasant of all possibilities-that their own favorite doctrines might prove wrong."

She watched Dedinger. Would the man catch on that she had aimed that barb at him?

The exiled pedagogue gave Sara a wry smile.

"Has it occurred to you, Miss Sara, that your last statement could apply to you and your own beloved hypothesis?"

Now it was Sara's turn to wince, then laugh aloud.

"Human nature. Each of us thinks we know what we're talking about and those disagreeing are fools. Creative people see Prometheus in a mirror, never Pandora."

Dedinger spoke with an ironic edge. "Sometimes the torch I carry scorches my fingers."

Sara could not tell how much he meant the remark in jest. Often she found it easier to read the feelings of a boon, or g'Kek, than some members of her own enigmatic race. Still, she found herself enjoying the conversation, the first of its kind in quite some time.

"As for trends here on Jijo, just look at the new rhythmic novels being published by some of the northern urrish tribes. Or the recent burst of hoonish romantic poetry. Or the GalTwo haiku imagery coming out of the Vale-"

A sharp whistle cut her short-a guttural, stop-command piped by UrKachu's upstretched throat. The queue of tired animals jostled to a halt, as the Urunthai leader pointed north of a stone spire, decreeing that a camouflaged shelter be raised in its long, tapered shadow.

In its shadow . . .

Blinking, Sara looked around to see that the night was over. Dawn-light filtered over the peaks, sifting through an early-morning haze. They had climbed among the mountains, or at least the rocky foothills, leaving behind the parched Warril Plain. Alas, they were by now far south of the well-worn trail leading to the Glade of Gathering.

Dedinger's courtliness clashed with his rough appearance, as he excused himself to organize his men. "I've enjoyed matching wits," he told her with a bow. "Perhaps we can resume later."

"Perhaps."

Although the discussion had been a pleasant diversion, she had no doubt the man would sacrifice her, along with all of her ideas, on the altar of his faith. Sara vowed to be ready for any occasion to sneak her friends away from these fanatics.

Right. An old man, a boy, a chimpanzee, a wounded alien, and an out-of-shape intellectual-even if we got a huge head start, these urs and desert-men would catch us faster than you can transform a sine wave.

Still, she gazed north toward high peaks where momentous events were taking place in hidden valleys, and thought-We'd better move fast, or else Ifni, G.o.d, and the universe will surely move on without us.

Asx NOW COMES OUR TURN TO THREATEN. Proctors fight to hold back a furious throng, hemming our erstwhile guests inside a circle of rage. The remaining alien-lovers, mostly humans, form a protective ring around the star-beings, while the twin robots swoop and dive, enforcing a buffer zone with bolts of stinging lightning.

Lester Cambel steps forward, raising both hands for calm. The raucous noise ebbs, as members of the mob ease their pressure on the harried proctors. Soon silence reigns. No one wants to miss the next move in this game, wherein all of us on Jijo are tokens being gambled, to be won or lost, counting on our skill and luck.

Lester bows to the Rothen emissary. In one hand he bears a stack of metal plates.