The Suzerain chirped a brief chastis.e.m.e.nt. It was not up to the investigators to determine propriety, only evaluations of fact. And anyway, matters of expense were the domain of the officers of the new Suzerain of Cost and Caution, after they recovered from the catastrophe their bureaucracy had suffered here.

The investigators danced regretful apologies.

The Suzerain's thoughts kept hovering in numb wonderment about what the consequences would be. This otherwise minor event had toppled the delicate balance of the Triumvirate just before another Command Conclave, and there would be repercussions even after a new third Suzerain was appointed.

In the short term, this would help both survivors. Beam and Talon would be free to pursue what few humans remained at large, whatever the cost. And Propriety could engage in research without constant carpings about how expensive it all would be.

And then there was the compet.i.tion for primacy to consider. In recent days it had begun to grow clear just how impressive the old Suzerain of Cost and Caution had been. More and more, against all expectation, it had been the one organizing their debates, drawing their best ideas forth, pushing compromises, leading them toward consensus.

The Suzerain of Propriety was ambitious. The priest had not liked the direction things were heading. Nor was it pleasant seeing its cleverest plans tinkered with, modified, altered to suit a bureaucrat. Especially one with bizarre ideas about empathy with aliens!

No, this was not the worst thing to have happened. Not at all. A new Threesome would be much more acceptable. More workable. And in the new balance the replacement would start at a disadvantage.

Then why, for what reason, for what cause am I afraid? the high priest wondered.

Shivering, the Suzerain of Propriety fluffed its plumage and concentrated, bring its thoughts back to the present, to the investigators' report. They seemed to be implying that the explosion and fire had fallen into that broad category of events that the Earthlings might call accidents.

At its erstwhile colleague's urging, the Suzerain had of late been trying to learn Anglic, the wolflings' strange, non-Galactic language. It was a difficult, frustrating effort, and of questionable utility when language computers were facile enough.

Yet the chief bureaucrat had insisted, and surprisingly the priest discovered there were things to be learned from even so beastly a collection of grunts and moans, things such as the hidden meanings underlying that term, accident.

The word obviously applied to what the investigators said had happened here, a number of unpredicated factors combined with considerable incompetence in the City Gas Department after the human supervisors had been removed. And yet the way Earthlings defined "accident" was wrong by definition! In Anglic the term actually had no precise meaning!

Even the humans had a truism, "There are no accidents."

If so, why have a word for a nonexistent thing?

Accident ... it served to cover anything from unper-ceived causality, to true randomness, to a full level seven probability storm! In every case the "results" were "accidental."

How could a species be s.p.a.cefaring, be cla.s.sified at the high level of a patron of a clan with such a murky, undefined, context-dependent way of looking at the universe? Compared with these Earthlings, even the devil trickster Tymbrimi were transparent and clear as the very ether!

This sort of uncomfortable line of thought was the sort of thing the priest had most hated about the bureaucrat! It was one of the dead Suzerain's most irritating attributes.

It was also one of the things most beloved and valuable. It would be missed.

Such were the confusions when a consensus was broken, when a mating was shattered, half begun.

Firmly, the Suzerain chirped a word-chain of definition. Introspection was taxing, and a decision had to made about what had happened here.

Under some potential futures the Gubru might have to pay damages to the Tymbrimi-and even to the Earthlings -- for the destruction that occurred on this plateau. It was unpalatable to consider, and might be prevented altogether when the Gubru grand design was fulfilled.

Events elsewhere in the Five Galaxies would determine that. This planet was a minor, if important, nut to sh.e.l.l with a quick, efficient bill thrust. Anyway, it was the job of the new Suzerain of Cost and Caution to see that expenses were kept down.

To see that the Gubru Alliance-the true inheritors of the Ancient Ones-were not found failing in propriety when the Progenitors returned, that was the priest's own task.

May the winds bring that day, it prayed.

"Judgment deferred, delayed, put off for now," the Suzerain declared aloud. And the investigators at once closed their folders.

The business of the chancery fire being finished, the next stop would be the top of the hill, where there was yet another matter to be evaluated.

The cooing crowd of Kwackoo huddled close and moved as a ma.s.s, carrying the Perch of Reckoning with them, a flat ball of puffy clients surging placidly through a feathery crowd of their hopping, excitable patrons.

The Diplomatic Cache still smoked on top from the events of the day before. The Suzerain listened carefully as the investigators reported, sometimes one at a time, occasionally joining together to chirp in unison and then counterpoint. Out of the cacophony the Suzerain gathered a picture of the events that had led to this scene.

A local neo-chimpanzee had been found poking around the cache without first seeking formal pa.s.sage by the occupying power, a clear violation of wartime protocol. n.o.body knew why the silly half-animal had been present. Perhaps it was driven by the "monkey complex"-that irritating, incomprehensible need that drove Earthlings to seek out excitement instead of prudently avoiding it.

An armed detachment had come upon the curious neochimp while routinely moving to secure the disaster area. The commander had urgently spoken to the furry client-of-humans, insisting that the Earthling creature desist at once, and show proper obeisance.

Typical of the upspring of humans, the neo-chimp had been obdurate. Instead of behaving in a civilized manner it had run away. In the process of trying to stop it, some defense device of the cairn was set off. The cairn was damaged in the subsequent shooting.

This time the Suzerain decided that the outcome was most satisfactory. Subclient or no, the chimpanzee was officially an ally of the cursed Tymbrimi. By acting so, it had destroyed the immunity of the cache! The soldiers were within their rights to open fire upon either the chimp or the defender globe without restraint. There had been no violation of propriety, the Suzerain ruled.

The investigators danced a dance of relief. Of course, the more closely ancient procedures were adhered to, the more brilliant would be the plumage of the Gubru when the Progenitors returned.

May the winds hurry the day.

"Open, enter, proceed into the cache," the priest commanded. "Enter and investigate the secrets within!"

Certainly the cache fail-safes would have destroyed most of the contents. Still, there might be some information of value left to be deciphered.

The simpler locks came off quickly, and special devices were brought to remove the ma.s.sive door. This all took some time. The priest kept occupied holding a service for a company of Talon Soldiers, preaching to reinforce their faith in the ancient values. It was important not to let them lose their keen edge with things so peaceful, so the Suzerain reminded them that in the last two days several small parties of warriors had gone missing in the mountains southeast of this very town. Now would be a useful time for them to remember that their lives belonged to the Nest. The Nest and Honor-nothing else mattered.

At last the final puzzle bolt was solved. For famous tricksters the Tymbrimi did not seem so clever. Their wards were easy enough for Gubru lockpick robots to solve. The door lifted off in the arms of a carrier drone. Holding instruments before them, the investigators cautiously entered the cairn.

Moments later, with a chirp-chain of surprise, a feathered form burst forth holding a black crystalline object in its beak. This one was followed almost immediately by another. The investigators' feet were a blur of dancing excitement as they laid the objects on the ground before the Suzerain's floating perch.

Intact! they danced. Two data-stores were found intact, shielded from the self-destruct explosions by a premature rockfall!

Glee spread among the investigators and from there to the soldiers and the civilians waiting beyond. Even the Kwackoo crooned happily, for they, too, could see that this counted as a coup of at least the fourth order. An Earthling client had destroyed the immunity of the cache through obviously irreverent behavior-the mark of flawed Uplift. And the result had been fully sanctioned access to enemy secrets!

The Tymbrimi and humans would be shamed, and the clan of Gooksyu-Gubru would learn much!

The celebration was Gubru-frenetic. But the Suzerain itself danced only for a few seconds. In a race of worriers, it had a role of redoubled concern. There were too many things about the universe that were suspect. Too many things that would be much better dead, lest they by some chance someday threaten the Nest.

The Suzerain tilted its head first one way then another. It looked down at the data cubes, black and shiny on the scorched loam. A strange juxtaposition seemed to overlie the salvaged record crystals, a feeling that almost, but not quite, translated into a brooding sense of dread.

It was not a recognizable psi-sense, nor any other form of scientific premonition. If it had been, the Suzerain would have ordered the cubes converted to dust then and there.

And yet ... It was very strange.

For only a brief moment, it shuddered under the illusion that the faceted crystals were eyes, the shining, s.p.a.ce-black eyes of a large and very dangerous snake 42 Robert He ran holding in one hand a new wooden bow. A simple, homespun quiver containing twenty new arrows bounced gently against his back as he puffed up the forest trail. His straw hat had been woven from river rushes. His loincloth and the moccasins on his feet were made of native suede.

The young man favored his left leg slightly as he ran. The bandage on that thigh covered only a superficial wound. Even the pain from the burn was a pleasure of sorts, reminding him how much preferable a near miss was over the alternative.

Image of a tall bird, staring unbelievingly at the arrow that had split its breastbone, its laser rifle tumbling to the forest loam, released by death-numbed talons.

The ridge was quiet. Almost the only sound was his steady breathing and the soft rasp of moccasins against the pebbles. p.r.i.c.kles of perspiration dried quickly as the breeze laid tracks of goose b.u.mps up his arms and legs.

The touch of wind freshened as he climbed. The slope of the trail tapered, and Robert at last found himself above the trees, among the towering hill-spines of the ridge crest.

The sudden warmth of the sun was welcome now that he had darkened nearly to the shade of a foon-nut tree. His skin had also toughened, making thorns and nettles less bothersome.

I'm probably starting to look like an oldtime Indian, he thought with some amus.e.m.e.nt. He leapt over a fallen log and slipped down along a lefthand fork in the trail.

As a child he had made much of his family name. Little Robert Oneagle had never had to take turns as a bad guy when the kids played Confederation Uprising. He always got to be a Cherokee or Mohawk warrior, whooping it up in make-believe s.p.a.cesuit and warpaint, zapping the dictator's soldiers during the Power Satellite War.

When this is all over I've got to find out more about the family gene-history, Robert thought. I wonder how much of it really is Amerindian stock.

White, fluffy stratus clouds slid along a pressure ridge to the north, appearing to keep pace with him as he jogged along the ridgetops, across the long hills leading toward home.

Toward home.

The phrase came easily now that he had a job to do out under the trees and open sky. Now he could think of those catachtonian caves as home. For they did represent sanctuary in uncertain times.

And Athaclena was there.

He had been away longer than expected. The trip had taken him high into the' mountains as far away as Spring Valley, recruiting volunteers, establishing communications, and generally spreading the word.

And of course, he and his fellow partisans had also had a couple of skirmishes with the enemy. Robert knew they had been little things-a small Gubru patrol trapped here and there-and annihilated to the last alien. The Resistance only struck where total victory seemed likely. There could be no survivors to tell the Gubru high command that Earthlings had learned to become invisible.

However minor, the victories had done wonders for morale. Still, while they might make things a bit warm for the Gubru up in the mountains, but what was the use if the enemy stayed out of reach?

Most of his trip had been taken up doing things hardly related to the Resistance. Everywhere Robert had gone he found himself surrounded by chims who whooped and chattered at the sight of him-the sole remaining free human. To his frustration they seemed perfectly happy to make him unofficial judge, arbitrator, and G.o.dfather to newborn babies. Never before had he felt so heavily the burdens that Uplift demanded of the patron race.

Not that he blamed the chims, of course. Robert doubted that in their species' brief history so many chims had ever been cut off from humans for so long.

Wherever he went, it became known that the last human in the mountains would not visit any pre-invasion building or, indeed, even see anyone wearing any clothing or artifact of non-Garth origin. As word spread how the alien gasbots found their targets, chims were soon moving whole communities. Cottage industries sprang up, resurrecting the lost arts of spinning and weaving, of tanning and cobbling.

Actually, the chims in the mountains were doing rather well. Food was plentiful and the young still attended school. Here and there a few responsible types had even begun to reorganize the Garth Ecological Reclamation Project, keeping the most urgent programs going, improvising to replace the lost human experts.

Perhaps they don't really need us, he remembered thinking.

His own kind had come within a hair's breadth of turning Earth-homeworld into an ecological Chelmno, in the years just before humanity awakened into sanity. A horrible calamity was averted by the narrowest of margins. Knowing that, it was humbling to see so many so-called clients behaving more rationally than men had only a century before Contact.

Do we really have any right to play G.o.d with these people? Maybe when this blows over we should just go away and let them work out their future for themselves.

A romantic idea. There was a rub, of course.

The Galactics would never let us.

So he let them crowd around him, ask his advice, name their babies after him. Then, when he had done all he could for the time being, he took off down the trail for home. Alone, since by now no chim could keep up with his pace.

The solitude of the last day or so had been welcome. It gave him time to think. He had begun learning a lot about himself these last few weeks and months, ever since that horrible afternoon when his mind had crumpled under pounding fists of agony and Athaclena had come into his mind to rescue him. Oddly, it had not turned out to be the beasts and monsters of his neuroses that mattered most. Those were easily dealt with once he faced them and knew them for what they were. Anyway, they were probably no worse than any other person's burdens of unresolved business from the past.

No, what had been more important was coming to grips with what he was as a man. That was an exploration he had only just begun, but Robert liked the direction the journey seemed to be heading.

He jogged around a bend in the mountain trail and came out of the hill's shadow with the sun on his back. Ahead, to the south, lay the craggy limestone formations concealing the Valley of Caves.

Robert stopped as a metallic glint caught his eye. Something sparkled over the prominences beyond the valley, perhaps ten miles away.

Gasbots, he thought. Over in that area Benjamin's techs had begun laying out samples of everything from electronics to metals to clothing, in an effort to discover what it was the Gubru robots homed in on. Robert hoped they had made some progress while he was away.

And yet, in another sense he hardly cared anymore. The new longbow felt good in his hand. The chims in the mountains preferred powerful homemade crossbows and arbalests, requiring less coordination but greater simian strength to crank. The effect had been the same with all three weapons . . . dead birds. The use of ancient skills and archaic tools had turned into a galvanizing theme, resonating with the mythos of the Wolfling Clan.

There were disturbing consequences as well. Once, after, a successful ambush, he had noticed some of the local mountain chens drifting away from camp. He slipped into the shadows and followed them to what appeared to be a secret cook fire, in a side canyon.

Earlier, while they had stripped the vanquished Gubru of their weapons and carried off the bodies, he had noticed some of the chims glancing back at him furtively, perhaps guiltily. That night he watched from a dark hillside as long-armed silhouettes danced in the firelight under the windblown stars. Something roasted on a spit over the flames, and the wind carried a sweet, smoky aroma.

Robert had had a feeling there were a few things the chims did not want seen by their patrons. He faded back into the shadows and returned to the main camp, leaving them to their ritual.

The images still flickered in his mind like feral, savage fantasies. Robert never asked what had been done with the bodies of the dead Galactics, but since then he could not think of the enemy without remembering that aroma.

If only there were a way to get more of them to come into the mountains, he pondered. Only under the trees did it seem possible to hurt the invaders.

The afternoon was aging. Time to finish the long jog home. Robert turned and was about to start down into the valley when he stopped suddenly. He blinked. There was a blur in the air. Something seemed to flutter at the edge of his vision, as if a tricky moth were dancing just within his blind spot. It didn't seem to be possible to look at the thing.

Oh, Robert thought.

He gave up trying to focus on it and looked away, letting the odd non-thing chase him instead. Its touch laid open the petals of his mind like a flower unfolding in the sun. The fluttering ent.i.ty danced timidly and winked at him ... a simple glyph of affection and mild amus.e.m.e.nt. . . easy enough for even a thick-thewed, hairy-armed, road-smelly, pinkish-brown human to understand.

"Very funny, Clennie." Robert shook his head. But the flower opened still wider and he kenned warmth. Without having to be told, he knew which way to go. He turned off the main trail and leapt up a narrow game path.

Halfway to the ridgetop he came upon a brown figure lounging in the shade of a thornbush. The chen looked up from a paperpage book and waved lazily.

"Hi, Robert. You're lookin' a lot better'n when.I saw you last."

"Fiben!" Robert grinned. "When did you get back?"

The chim suppressed a tired yawn. "Oh, 'bout an hour ago. The boys down in th' caves sent me right up here to see her nibs. I picked up somethin' for her in town. Sorry. Didn't get anythin' for you, though."

"Did you get into any trouble in Port Helenia?"

"Hmmm, well, some. A little dancin', a little scratchin', a little hootin'."

Robert smiled. Fiben's "accent" was always thickest when he had big news to downplay, the better to draw out the story. If allowed to get away with it, he would surely keep them up all night.

"Uh, Fiben ..."

"Yeah, yeah. She's up there." The chim gestured toward the top of the ridge. "And in a right fey mood, if you ask me. But don't ask me, I'm just a chimpanzee. I'll see you later, Robert." He picked up his book again, not exactly the model of a reverent client. Robert grinned.

"Thanks, Fiben. I'll see ya." He hurried up the trail.

Athaclena did not bother to turn around as he approached, for they had already said h.e.l.lo. She stood at the hilltop looking westward, her face to the sun, holding her hands outstretched before her.

Robert at once sensed that another glyph floated over Athaclena now, supported by the waving tendrils of her corona. And it was an impressive thing. Comparing her little greeting, earlier, to this one would be like standing a dirty limerick next to "Xanadu." He could not see it, neither could he even begin to kenn its complexity, but it was there, nearly palpable to his heightened empathy sense.

Robert also realized that she held something between her hands . . . like a slender thread of invisible fire-intuited more than seen-that arched across the gap from one hand to the other.