"This way," I signed, and ran diagonally upslope to the left, where lay the track leading up to that tree-felling machine.

We reached the track, but did not step onto it, since that would expose us out in the open.

"What have you seen?" asked Slog.

I signed, "One figure by a machine up at the top of this track." Delving into the front pocket of my dungarees I took out the gift Duras had given me, and loaded it. Slog grunted noncommittally, then set out upslope, Flog behind him. At no point did they take their eyes from the sights of their rifles—the weapons seemed sealed in place and they perfectly comfortable with them. I coughed, breathing raw, spat blood and mucus, then looked down at the fist-sized hole below my collar bone. Blood seeped, and raw flesh layered with purplish woody bands lay exposed. It felt numb, as such wounds had felt for me for a long time, but I knew this one would not heal in just a matter of hours, and that at some point it would begin to hurt like hell. I followed them.

The two quofarl obviously possessed some idea of the machine's location since, as we drew close, they began advancing one at a time, covering each other with professional care. Then there, glimpsed between the tree clumps, loomed open metallic jaws and that saw tongue. A whistling crackling caused me to fling myself to the ground. Pieces of brown and yellow bark rained down. I looked around for my companions but could see no sign of them, so crawled on towards the machine. A low drumming thump sounded. A tree clump exploded and a human figure spun away, loose-limbed and broken. A human figure—but not quofarl-shaped.

Reaching the forest edge, I dropped down onto the track and ran towards the logging machine, automatic held out in front of me. A figure darted out and, identifying it as one of the attackers, I tracked it across, firing all the time. Returning fire spewed up gravel towards me, then Slog appeared and hit the figure from one side. The attacker shrieked, slammed into the logging machine's cowling, and bounced away. Then, on all fours, Slog disappeared into the trees again. Running up, I glimpsed the man on the ground. He wore an insulated suit—Sudorian—one of his arms was missing and his throat was torn out down to the spine. More firing from all around. Back in the trees I crouched behind a woody clump.

Brumallian speech, mandibles only, a woodpecker clattering: "One left—do we want him alive?"

The reply, "Yeah."

That familiar sickening squirming began inside me, and looking down at my wound revealed the sensation to be utterly accurate, for my flesh was shifting and shuddering. More firing from an automatic weapon, followed by a thoroughly human bellow. I stood and headed towards the source of the sound, soon finding Flog suspending a Sudorian up off the ground by his ankle, and Slog standing to one side picking gobbets of flesh from his mandibles.

"How did we lose against these?" wondered Flog.

"They got lucky," Slog replied.

I found myself down on my knees, everything seeming to grow dark around me. Next I was hanging over Slog's shoulder, in such pain I felt sure I was dying. Then the blackness became entire.

Orduval—in the Desert

The corpse lay spread-eagled on the rock, anchor bolts driven through between the bones of the forearms and of the lower legs. It had been stripped naked, and had not decayed, but dried out—skin and flesh turned hard and woody, eyes sunk away. Orduval rapped a knuckle against the victim's chest and was rewarded with a hollow thunk.

A piece of history, he thought.

Here lay one of those who had dragged them into the War against the Brumallians and benefited as a result rather too much…initially. He, yes a he, had been bolted here to the stone probably seventy or eighty years before Orduval was born, and just after the economic collapse resulting from the first two decades of the War. He wondered who this person had been, an industrialist or one of the politicians in the pay of the industrialists? The collapse, he recollected, resulted in a putsch—the old oligarchy being ousted and replaced by people's representatives from the various Sudorian states, from Fleet and from the then-nascent Orbital Combine. Only the threat from Brumal had prevented a total collapse of the civil system too. Orduval now knew a great deal about all this, though some years back had not known nearly so much. But then, since being in the desert he had needed to learn how things were before the War, right from the beginning, so he could translate it in full, make it contemporary, enable people to understand. He remembered a conversation with Tigger, back then.

"It is almost as if I contain a surfeit of words, and that if I can write them all out of my mind I will find a cold centre point of understanding," he said.

"But these are not your words," the drone replied, dipping its muzzle towards the stack of book disks it had deposited on the floor.

"Yes, but I need to translate them and understand the underlying meanings in order to get to my words."

"Could it be that the cold centre point you seek is that star you once described to Rhodane as lying at the centre of your mind—the source of your fits. Are you not trying to write your way back to your previous condition?"

It had worried him at first how much Tigger knew about him, and he still felt uncomfortable with the idea that throughout his life this Polity drone had watched him and his siblings so closely. Tigger's contention also bothered him, for he still did not really know his own mind, or purpose.

"That is entirely possible, but I have to find out for myself," he replied. "Now, will you be able to connect me into the Sudorian net?"

The tiger shrugged. "Certainly."

Considering how much he had learnt since then, Orduval turned away from the dried-out corpse and began making his way back towards his cave. His history of the colonisation and the years leading up to the War, now published by the Ruberne Institute, had caused a media furore and questions to be asked in Parliament, and now there were those in the media prepared to pay a small fortune to anyone who could locate him. Tigger assured him that his netlink was untraceable with current Sudorian software, and that equally no one could trace him through the private account he had set up—that was until he withdrew any money from it. He did not need to.

Orduval estimated that his take on the War with the Brumallians would be ready for the Institute sometime soon, but he was finding himself distracted by the news of, finally, open contact with the Polity. Tigger had informed him long before that this was going to happen, but the content of and reactions to the communications Parliament published fascinated him. He had been living a hermit existence here and so, disconnected from his world, the reality of Tigger and the Polity did not seem so real until now.

Finally reaching his cave, Orduval saw the door standing open. For a moment he wondered if he had been discovered, and wondered too if he any longer considered that a problem. However, when he stepped into the cave he found Tigger waiting for him beside the desk.

"You must finish this," said the drone.

"I know I must—remember that surfeit of words?"

"Yes, I remember…but it is important that you finish this soon and get it into the public domain."

"Why the urgency?"

"You've been listening to the recordings and reading the transcripts of the communications between Parliament and the AI Geronamid?"

"I have."

"Then you must understand that contact between you people and the Polity will not continue to remain limited to this…conversation?"

"Yes, I see that."