"He could stay hidden in a village through the winter, maybe. Not go down into Amareza at all. I will need time, Maz Ikak Igneba — the Envoy will need time — to talk to people in Dovza. And if a ship comes next year, as it’s due to, then we can talk on the ansible with the Stabiles of the Ekumen about these matters. But it will take time."

Ikak nodded. "I’ll speak with the others about it We’ll do what we can."

Sutty went immediately after dinner to Yara’s tent.

Both Akidan and Odiedin were already there, Akidan with the warm clothing Yara would need for the journey, Odiedin to reas-sure him about making it. Akidan was excited about leaving. Sutty was touched to see how kindly he spoke to Yara, his handsome young face alight. "Don’t worry, yoz," he said earnestly, "it’s an easy path and we’ve got a very strong group. We’ll be down in the hills in a week."

"Thank you," Yara said, expressionless. His face had closed.

"Tobadan Siez will be with you," Odiedin said.

Yara nodded. "Thank you," he said again.

Kieri arrived with a thermal poncho Akidan had forgotten, and came crowding in with it, talking away. The tent was too full. Sutty knelt in the entrance and put her hand on Yara’s hand. She had never touched him before.

"Thank you for telling me what you told me, Yara," she said, feeling hurried and self-conscious. "And for letting me tell you. I hope you — I hope things work out. Goodbye."

Looking up at her, he gave his brief nod, and turned his head away.

She went back to her tent, anxious yet also relieved.

The tent was a mess: Kieri had thrown around everything she owned in preparation for packing it. Sutty looked forward to sharing a tent with Odiedin again, to order, silence, celibacy.

She had spent a long day working on the catalogue, tiring, tricky work with the balky and laborious Akan programs. She went to bed, intending to get up very early and see her friends off. She slept at once. Kieri’s return and the fuss of her packing scarcely disturbed her. It seemed about five minutes before the lamp was on again and Kieri was up, dressed, leaving. Sutty struggled out of her sleeping bag and said, "I’ll be at breakfast with you."

But when she got to the kitchen, the people of the departing group weren’t there having the hot meal that would start them on their way. Nobody was there but Long, who was on cooking duty.

"Where is everybody, Long?" she asked, alarmed. "They haven’t left already, have they?"

"No," Long said.

"Is something wrong?"

"I think so, yoz Sutty." His face was distressed. He nodded toward the outer caves. She went to the entrance that led to them. She met Odiedin coming in.

"What’s wrong?"

"Oh Sutty," Odiedin said. He made an incomplete, hopeless gesture.

"What is it?"

"Yara."

"What?"

"Come with me."

She followed him into the Tree Cave. He walked past Yara’s tent. There were a lot of people around it, but she did not see Yara. Odiedin strode on through the small cave with a rough floor, and from that to the short passage that led to the outside by the doorway arch they could get through only on hands and knees.

Odiedin stood up just outside it. Sutty emerged beside him. It was far from sunrise still, but the high pallor of the sky seemed wonderfully radiant and vast after the spaceless darkness of the caves.

"See where he went," Odiedin said.

She looked down from the light to where he pointed. Snow lay ankle deep on the floor of the cirque. From the arch where they stood, boot tracks led straight out to the edge and back, tracks of three or four people, she thought.

"Not the tracks," Odiedin said. "Those are ours. He was on hands and knees. He couldn’t walk. I don’t know how he could crawl on that knee. It’s a long way."

She saw, now, the marks in the snow, heavy, dragging furrows. All the boot tracks kept to the left of them.

"Nobody heard him. Sometime after midnight, he must have crept out."

Looking down, quite close to the arch, where the snow was thin on the black rock, she saw a blurred handprint.

"Out there at the edge," Odiedin said, "he stood up. So that he could leap."

Sutty made a little noise. She sank down squatting, rocking her body a little. No tears came, but her throat was tight, she could not breathe.

"Penan Teran," she said. Odiedin did not understand her. "Onto the wind," she said.

"He didn’t have to do this." Odiedin’s voice was fierce, desolate. "It was wrong."

"He thought it was right," Sutty said.

NINE

The corporation airplane that flew her from Soboy in Amareza to Dovza City gained altitude over the eastern Headwaters Range. Looking out the small window, due west, she saw a great, rough, rocky, bulky mountain: Zubuam. And then, soaring up behind it, the whiteness of the barrier wall, hiding somewhere in its luminous immensity the cirque and the caves of being. Above the serrate rim of the barrier, level with her eye, the horn of Silong soared white-gold against blue. She saw it whole, entire, this one time. The thin, eternal banner blew northward from the summit. The trek south had been hard, two long weeks, on a good path but with bad weather along much of the way; and she had had no rest in Soboy. The Corporation had their police watching every road out of the Headwaters Range. Officials, very polite, very tense, had met her party just inside the city. "The Observer is to be flown at once to the capital."

She had demanded to speak to the Envoy by telephone, and they had put the call through for her at the airfield. "Come along, as soon as you can," Tong Ov said. "There’s been much alarm. We all rejoice at your safe return. Akan and alien alike. Though especially this alien."

She said, "I have to make sure my friends are all right."

"Bring them with you," Tong said.

So Odiedin and the two guides from the village in the foothills west of Okzat-Ozkat were sitting together in the three seats behind hers. What Long and Ieyu made of it all she had no idea. Odiedin had explained or reassured them a little, and they had climbed aboard quite impassively. All four of them were tired, muzzy-headed, worn out.

The plane turned eastward. When she next looked down, she saw the yellow of snowless foothills, the silver thread of a river. The Ereha. Daughter of the Mountain. They followed the silver thread as it broadened and dulled to grey all the way down to Dovza City.

"The base culture, under the Dovzan overlay, is not vertical, not militant, not aggressive, and not progressive," Sutty said. "It’s level, mercantile, discursive, and homeostatic. In crisis I think they fall back on it. I think we can bargain with them."

Napoleon Buonaparte called the English a nation of shopkeepers, Uncle Hurree said in her mind. Maybe not altogether a bad thing?

Too much was in her mind. Too much to tell Tong; too much to hear from him. They had had little over an hour to talk, and the Executives and Ministers were due to arrive any minute.

"Bargain?" asked the Envoy. They were speaking in Dovzan, since Odiedin was present.

"They owe us," Sutty said.

"Owe us?"

Chiffewar was neither a militant nor a mercantile culture. There were concepts that Chiffewarians, for all their breadth and subtlety of mind, had trouble understanding.

"You’ll have to trust me," Sutty said.

"I do," said the Envoy. "But please explain, however cryptically, what this bargain is."

"Well, if you agree that we should try to preserve the Library at Silong…"

"Yes, of course, in principle. But if it involves interference with Akan policy-"

"We’ve been interfering with Aka for seventy years."

"But how could we arbitrarily refuse them information-since we couldn’t undo that first tremendous gift of technological specifics?"