There must be a bright side to this. "Could Tycoon be turned into an ally?" said Ravna.

There was a moment of silence. Then: "Maybe. But see, Tycoon really, really hates humans. And one in particular."

Ravna thought of what Tycoon must have done to little Geri. If this was what the creature did to lesser enemies- "So who is his number-one enemy?" asked Jefri.

"Johanna."

"What!"

"Why?"

"I don't know!" Amdi's voice was plaintive. "Johanna has always been the most beloved human in the Domain-sorry, Ravna, but you know what Jo did for the veterans. You'd be second, though!"

"Ah, thank you." She glanced at Jefri. "We've got to figure this out."

"And not get killed." That was probably Mr. Radio, but the point was valid, whoever made it.

"Yes," said Amdi. "Now we gotta go. I..."

Amdi seemed to hesitate, then Zek gave a squeak and collapsed across Ravna's middle. He remained silent as Ritl gobbled softly at him.

Jefri bent to stroke Zek with his own forehead, much the way a pack will try to rouse an injured member. Ravna was surprised that any good could come from a human making the gesture, but after a moment, Zek struggled back against the wall. He swayed, still disoriented.

"He must have lost comm very abruptly," said Jefri.

Ravna heard no alarms from the hallway. Without Radio, their activity here might remain unnoticed for some time. "Amdi's side could be fine," she said.

Jefri nodded. "But we have to get these two back to wherever they're supposed to be." He said something to Zek. It sounded like he was humming and whistling at the same time, but different tunes. Ravna had never figured out how some of the Children could manage such coordination. But Zek waved his head uncomprehendingly. Next to Johanna, Jefri Olsndot might be the most Tinishly-fluent human, but it still took practice for a pack to make sense of humans attempting Tinish. "Okay," said Jefri, speaking Samnorsk now, "can you understand me?"

"I hear," Zek said.

"Amdi?"

"No."

"He's making sense," said Ravna. "He may still have a link to some other members."

Jefri nodded. "You alone now?"

Zek gave another uncomprehending shake of the head.

Jefri glanced at Ritl. "Together, these two could probably get back where they came from ... at least if they don't run into somebody who wants explanations."

"They got here okay," said Ravna.

"Yeah, but that was when Radio had most of his mind and Amdi was along for the ride." He paused. "Well, if Zek is nearly single now, there is something that might work. After all, Ritl is already a desperate singleton and Mr. Radio Cloaks must be a loosely-held soul." Jef reached out and softly patted Zek's shoulder. Then he slipped his hand under the creature's cloak, pushing it away from where it covered Zek's shoulder tympana.

Zek flinched back with a whistling sound. Lots of needle-sharp teeth were just centimeters from Jef's face.

"Not to worry," Jefri spoke the words gently, calmingly ... to whom? "If this is like Flenser and his cloaks, Zek has sores all around his tympana. I just have to be very gentle. And Zek has to trust me." He lifted the cloak free of Zek's left side. The creature was trembling, but it didn't bite.

Jef folded the left side of the cloak over Zek's back. "You're really out of contact, aren't you, kiddo?" He looked at Ravna. "This is a long shot, but I can't think of anything else." He waved for Ritl to come close. The singleton hesitated, maybe taking one more close listen on the hallway, then it crawled close to Jefri. Ritl's eyes were on Zek, her head shifting uneasily back and forth. Jefri scooched himself out of the way, then tugged at both creatures, urging them close together. Now they were both sitting mostly on Ravna.

Ritl made a Tinish "yech" sound, then gobbled on, softly complaining. Now that Zek was out from under his cloak, his mindsounds would be loud to any nearby member. This close to each other, the two creatures were in a fight, flight, or merge situation. For normal pack members, "merge" would have been by far the least likely outcome. Even in this desperate situation, the two acted like debutantes confronting sexual perversion.

"Well, crap." The human words seem to come from the space between the Tines.

"They synched up!" Jefri's voice was full of wonder. "Can you understand me?"

"Yesss." The voice sounded more annoyed than frightened. Ritl plus Zek might be smarter than either was separately, but it wasn't a happy camper.

Jef said, "You lost contact with the rest of yourself, right?"

"Hurt noise, lost all radio."

Ravna said, "Zekritl? Can you make it back to your cabins?"

Puzzled head-weaving was the reply.

Jefri rephrased: "Go back? Safe and quiet?"

The duo looked at each other. "Okay. Will try." The two climbed over Jefri and Ravna, an elaborate dance that endeavored to keep Zek's exposed side available to Ritl's hearing. Ritl lowered her head and slid the door open. A moment later she was out in the hall, turned so that mutual thought was still possible.

Zek followed, but the top of his cloak caught on the door. Jefri helped undo the snag and guided him out. Jef peeked out into the hall, blocking Ravna's view. She heard someone say softly, "Bye bye."

Jefri watched them for a few seconds more. Then he slid the door shut and jiggled its bolt into position. He was shaking his head. "By the Powers, they look like Tami and Wilm staggering home from the pub."

He lay back, silent.... "You know, it could have been a low charge problem. Scrupilo's radios fail like that. When they've been away from sunlight too long-bam, no error message, no bit-rate backoff, just silence."

"Right," said Ravna. "I'll bet these cloaks were at the end of a long-use period." She thought about it for a second, imagining innocuous explanations for the apparently global failure. They were possible.

After a moment, Jefri said, "Oh, Amdi. You didn't have to be a hero."

CHAPTER 32.

The next morning, it was the friendly steward, not the gunpack, who was at their door. "Amdi must be okay, too, Jef," said Ravna. Believe it.

The airships were cruising lower than ever, but the cloud cover was incomplete. Sunlight slanted down in misty shafts, shining in fragments of rainbows where it found patches of rainfall in the greenish dark.

The city extended to the limits of their vision. It was still chaotic; you could see it was a slum. But now Ravna sensed patterns lurking in the landscape. If you ignored its constituent junk, this place had a claim to beauty, a clash of fungus and forest pretending to be a great city. And even the details were not all unpleasant. She could smell cooking fires. The food smells were good, almost covering the sewage taint that also hung in the air.

"Powers. Look, Ravna, the Tines just swarm!"

Most of the streets were hidden by surrounding structures, but she saw ... plazas? Most were just five or six meters across, but they were connected to occasional larger open spaces. In the distance she could see what might have been a hectare of stony open space. Tines were everywhere-on rooftops, in the streets, in the plazas. Myriads of Tines, but crowded so close together there surely could be no packs at all.

"Ten years ago, this looked different," said Ravna. "Oobii took pictures as it approached Tines World." The Tropics had been in the whole disk images only, and there had been only a few breaks in the jungle cloud cover, but, "What we saw back then was not so crowded and somehow-well, it looked simpler." She watched silently for a moment, wondering. Down Here there was no possibility that the Choir itself was super-intelligent. For that matter, there wasn't even the communication technology to support wide-area cognition: Mindsounds would take minutes to percolate across the megacity. And yet, there was some form of group activity. The mob seemed to have greater and lesser densities, and not just where Tines gathered around the piles of rotting vegetation that filled many of the smaller plazas. There were places where she could see the ground, where members were separated by meters of empty space. Such open areas couldn't be for coherent thought, though, since there was no pack-like clustering. It was almost as if.... She focused on one particular empty area, watching until the airship had passed it by. Ah! "Those empty areas? They're moving."

"What?"

"Just look-" Given that they each had their own tiny porthole, it was impossible for her to point. "Look down that street," zigzagging into the distance, mostly unobscured by surrounding structures, there was only one thing she could mean.

"Right ... okay, I see a couple thin spots in the crowd." He watched for the minute or so that they could keep the path in view. "Yes," he finally said. "I think the uncrowded areas were slowly moving further away. Huh. I suppose you would see that in pre-tech cities. Didn't they have special policemen to order the traffic around?"

"I don't think it's traffic control. The sparse areas also shrink and expand. Look at that plaza."

For a moment the view was nearly perfect for Ravna's purpose. Thinning swept in from a side path. Then the plaza and the main street became a little less crowded, Tines moving slightly to the sides of the street. As they drifted back to the middle of the street, it became as packed as ever-but the thinning continued to propagate down the side path.

"Yeah," Jefri said slowly, amazement in his voice. "These are density waves moving across the city, but we can only see them in the streets and plazas."

"It's like the Tines are swaying to music." Truly a Choir.

The airship executed one of its long, slow turns and their view swept across territory that had been directly ahead. Now the nearest lands were hidden by low clouds, but pillars of sunlight shone into the far distance ... upon the largest structure Ravna had ever seen on Tines World. "Powers," she said softly. "There was nothing like this in the approach photography."

They were too far away to see details, but the main structure was tetrahedral. Its edges were slumped and irregular, but on average, the pyramid's lines were perfectly straight. Parts of the surface gleamed golden even in the haze. Secondary pyramids sat at the base of the huge one, each quite possibly larger than Newcastle-and at the corners of those were still smaller pyramids. Smaller and smaller, Ravna followed the progression down to the limits of her vision.

Their airship was turning again. The pyramid slid out of sight. "There's the other airship," said Jefri. The craft was well below them, descending into the lower cloud deck. It swirled the cloud surface like a fish diving through sea foam. Then it was gone, and a moment after that they, too, were in the clouds. They broke through into a drizzly gray morning. The ground below looked nothing like the jumbled slums or the great pyramid. She caught sight of spires and domes very like the palaces of East Coast royalty. I'll bet that's where Vendacious and Tycoon lord it over the locals. Directly ahead of the other airship, the ground was as open and flat as a tabletop. The landing field would have been recognized by any low-tech inhabitant of an earthlike planet, though this one was marred by floodways and several large ponds.

Five structures hulked at the end of the field. They were small by comparison with the pyramid, but each was large enough to shelter an airship. The clamshell doors on two of them had been slid open.

Vendacious stood by his ship's landing pylon and watched the ground crews work to lash down Tycoon's airship.

How I hate the Tropics! The thought surfaced every time he returned here. The heat and humidity were as bad as any he'd known in his well-remembered life; this morning's drizzle counted as comfort by the standards of this place! Then there were the parasites, the gut worms and flesh burrowers, and all the diseases-themselves caused by microscopic predators, according to the ever-cheery Dataset. He never used to get the vomits, and now that happened regularly. In the early years of his time here, Vendacious had lost two members to disease. Finding appropriate replacements had been no small challenge, even with an endless stream of raw material to choose from.

And yet ... part of Vendacious was gazing to the left, at the magnificent palace Tycoon had built for him. Vendacious couldn't have risked such magnificence up north, not with Woodcarver's death sentence hanging over him. Now that two of Vendacious were Tropical, sometimes he actually felt an insane fondness for the place. In Dataset, Vendacious had read about natural selection. The notion was quaint and obvious, but no fun when you were doing it to yourself! It was frightening to realize that if his triumph were delayed long enough, he might prefer this hellhole to the north.

Meantime, he'd have to put up with both the climate and Tycoon. The local fragment of Radio stood just a few meters away, providing a link to the great Tycoon. Ut looked even more miserable than Vendacious felt. Part of that was the heavy, muffling cloak the creature had to wear. Part of it was the fear in the creature's eyes. Ut had been taught to fear and obey and keep secrets. The lessons necessarily had been delivered in covert ways, unseen by those outside Vendacious' inner court. After last night, Ut had even more to fear. What had the animal been up to, playing with the cabin keys? The guards said he hadn't been wearing his cloak, so whatever it was had been mindless and confined to the ship. That was the only thing that had saved Ut from a proper and final punishment-no matter how suspicious the death might look to Tycoon. Nevertheless Ut faced some strict discipline; no more deviations would be tolerated.

Ut fearfully came closer. When it spoke, it was to relay Tycoon's confident and demanding voice: "Recall, Vendacious, I want both two-legs delivered to me. What's left of Remasritlfeer, too."

No doubt Tycoon was lounging about in the comfort of his palace. The fat bastards' notion of "surviving in style" was to have Vendacious do all the hard work. Eight years of practice had not made it any easier to suck up to the fool, but Vendacious managed a respectful response: "I understand, sir. Their airship is just now being moored."

"What about the two packs who were captured with the humans?"

Vendacious had been expecting this question. With the right strategy, he wouldn't have to release them. "They're loyal dupes, but eventually I should be able to undo the humans' influence."

Ut relayed a sigh. "That's the way it has so often been with these two-legged monsters. One wonders how they can fool anyone."

"Their technology gives them an overwhelming advantage, sir."

"Of course. But in the end, that will not protect them from me."

Vendacious grimaced. You couldn't talk to Tycoon for more than a minute without his ego slopping out. Of course, that was half the reason he was so easy to manipulate. "Your time will come, sir.... I see the ship's hatch has opened. I'll have a wagon deliver the humans directly to you."

Mercifully, Tycoon wasn't interested in further conversation; there was no need for more groveling. Vendacious stayed near the landing pylon but spread out to watch the prisoners coming down from the other ship: Ritl. All that was left of Remasritlfeer. He watched the singleton as it pranced regally across the concrete, a bit of flotsam that could still cause trouble.

Ravna and Jefri. With Johanna gone, these were the two most dangerous humans alive. They could destroy everything he had created. From interrogating Amdiranifani and the Steel remnant, he knew how Chitiratifor had botched his mission.

Still, a clean solution might have been possible if Tycoon had not meddled in the follow-up search. And now? Perhaps it was just as well these two weren't in his clutches. The temptation to end them would have been irresistible and alas, he'd already spent far too much of his credibility by murdering others he'd held for Tycoon.

He watched the rickshaw wagon pull away with the two humans and the singleton. Tycoon's guard padded along after.

What then was the good news in this debacle? Amdiranifani. He was perhaps the ideal hostage and certainly an entertaining victim. Breaking down a genius was often the most fun, especially in this case, in which the victim still thought it could outsmart the interrogator.

When the airships landed, Timor Ristling was up in his dungeon. The early morning had brought the usual rain, but also a good breeze. Maybe it wouldn't get too terribly hot today. He sat in the westside window, enjoying the rainy breeze, doing his best to ignore all the old aches and pains. They were still there, but if he gave in to them, he would not have a life.

Timor's dungeon was in one of the four spires that surrounded Tycoon's palace. This was the highest point anywhere in the Reservation-though the Choir's pyramid was so much taller that on sunny mornings most of the palace was in its shade. From his west-side window, Timor could look down on the airfield and the cuttlefish ponds, as well as the factories beyond. He kept his ankles wrapped around the nearest window pillar and leaned back firmly against the wall. Just sitting on a ledge so high up was deliciously scary.

The lead airship was audible now. It slanted down toward the pylon in front of Vendacious' hangar. Okay, so nothing officially belonged to Vendacious-but he controlled that area and the palace annex, and all who lived there. It was a miracle that Geri had survived her tendays in the annex.

He watched the landing crew tie down the first airship. The airships reminded him of insystem freighters floating on agrav; the similarity always made Timor sad. Someday, someday, if Ravna can only win ... we'll make it back to the Beyond.

Several packs got off the first ship-and now the second aircraft was coming down. Tycoon had been unusually secretive about what to expect. In principle that should mean Timor was almost clueless, since very few packs in Tycoon's palace spoke Samnorsk. On the other hand, the cuttlefish gave him occasional clues in their scatterbrained way, and Timor had become adept at building speculations out of Tycoon's silences and complaints and brags and favors. Five days ago, these two ships had abruptly left. Tycoon had let slip that Vendacious was aboard, so action against humans was probably planned. If no humans were aboard this second ship ... well, that might be a very bad sign.

Someone was coming out of the second ship! It was a singleton or maybe a small human child. Timor's eyesight was almost as bad as the average pack member's; all he was sure of was that this passenger was not a pack. Timor climbed down from the windowsill and grabbed the binoculars Tycoon had given him. The gear was heavy and-of course-without a bit of stabilization or enhancement. Timor had had to wheedle a connecting frame out of Tycoon; the guy had complained about the inconvenience of dealing with human limitations, but Timor could tell that he was secretly proud to show off. Tycoon claimed that telescopes were the invention of his own pack brother, more than ten years ago. "We really don't need you humans, you know." Tycoon said that a lot.

Timor rested the device on the window ledge and looked through it, seeing nothing but a lot of rain-wet concrete. No sign of that small first passenger. Ah, now he was looking at some part of the airship. The main hatch was hidden beneath the curve of the hull, but he could see a pack near the entrance. It was watching something that it thought was important. Timor looked for a second more, holding the optics as steady as he could.... A gunpack came smartly down the stairs, its gun muzzles down, but watching in all directions. It looked like Mr. Skeetshooter, the fellow who usually guarded Timor.

And then there was a human. A guy, tall. From this angle, it was hard to ... that was Jefri Olsndot! But I thought he was one of Nevil's toadies? The thought flitted out of his mind because a second human had appeared.

Ravna!

Timor hunched forward, losing the view for a moment. When he found her again, Ravna had descended the stairs. She seemed to be leaning against Jefri. Seeing her here was the best thing he could imagine ... or was it the worst? He'd know when he saw which direction they were taking her. Mr. Skeets herded Ravna and Jefri to a little rickshaw wagon. There was the singleton, already aboard.

After a moment the rickshaw driver pulled them away, followed by Mr. Skeets. They were headed here, to the House of Tycoon! The rickshaw disappeared beneath his tower's view. He watched the airships a few moments more, but saw only crew and maintenance packs.

Timor slid down to the floor, the binoculars now unnoticed in his lap. Maybe he should keep watching, but he was too busy thinking about what this could mean and what he should do: Tell Geri. Decide how to approach Tycoon on this. Timor had gotten better at guessing how the big guy would react to developments-even if the reasons for the reaction were not always clear. In the beginning, Timor had tried to explain that Ravna was a good person who should be an ally. That had not worked very well, though Timor was sure-almost sure-that Tycoon would not kill her out of hand the way Vendacious wanted.

Suddenly he was overcome by the need to move; he'd plan on the way. He climbed to his feet and set the binoculars in their velvet box. Geri's cell was above his. Getting up the stairs was always a pain, though Tinish steps were easier for him to climb than steps the size most humans preferred. He'd considered complaining about the problem-but there was no way to make the stairs more convenient for his bad legs. If the Big Guy took him seriously, he might just move Timor out of the tower entirely.

The tiny stairwell was cool, the walls and steps slick with condensation. The door at the top was metal, edged with a rubber sealing ring. He tapped politely on its surface, then popped it open.

"Hei, Geri. It's me, Timor." Actually, it couldn't be anyone else, not through this door. "Can I come in?"

There was no answer, but Geri replied only on her really good days. Timor eased the door open and stepped into the cold semidarkness. Actually the room was pretty warm by Domain standards, but it was at least ten degrees cooler than outdoors, and unlike in the stairwell, the air was relatively dry. Timor himself had lived in this room for a few tendays-till the lack of windows and the hassle of moving in and out of the heat had gotten to him. Geri would have that problem too if-when she felt well enough to leave the room.

"Geri?"

Shadows shifted and a head poked up. "She here. She say no visit." That was the jailer, a not very bright foursome-but one of the few packs who spoke some Samnorsk.