Suessi sighed. After three hundred years, one still wanted to tread lightly with dolphins. Criticism tended to break them up. Positive reinforcement worked much better.

"All right. Let's try it again, hmm? Carefully. You came a lot closer that time."

Suessi shook his head and wondered what kind of lunacy had ever driven him to become an engineer.

32 ::: Galactics

The battle had moved away from this region of space; the Tandu feet had once again survived.

The Pthaca faction had joined with the Thennanin and Gubru, and the lot of the Soro remained dangerous. The Brothers of the Night had been almost destroyed.

The Acceptor perched in the center of its web and peeled back its shields in careful stages, as it had been trained to do. It had taken the Tandu masters millennia to teach its race to use mind shields at all, so loath were they to let anything pass unwitnessed.

As the barriers fell, the Acceptor eagerly probed nearby space, caressing clouds of vapor and drifting wreckage. It lightly skirted over untriggered psi-traps and fields of unresolved probability. Battles were lovely to look at, but they were also dangerous.

Recognition of danger was another thing the Tandu had force-fed them. In secret, the Acceptor's species didn't take it very seriously. Could something that actually happened ever be bad? The Episiarch felt that way, and look how crazy it was!

The Acceptor noticed something it would normally have overlooked. If it had been free to espertouch the ships, planets, and missiles, it would have been too distracted to detect such a subtle nuance — thoughts of a single, disciplined mind.

Delighted, the Acceptor realized the sender was a Synthian! There was a Synthian here, and it was trying to communicate with the Earthlings!

It was an anomaly, and therefore beautiful. The Acceptor had never witnessed a daring Synthian before.

Neither were Synthians famed for their psychic skill, but this one was doing a creditable job of threading through the myriad psi detectors all sides had spread through nearby space.

The feat was marvelous for its unexpectedness… one more proof of the superiority of objective reality over the subjective, in spite of the ravings of the Episiarch! Surprise was the essence of life.

The Acceptor knew it would be punished if it spent much longer marveling at this event instead of reporting it.

That, too, was a source of wonder, this "punishment" by which the Tandu were able to make the Acceptor's people choose one path over another. For 40,000 years it had amazed them. Someday they might do something about it. But there was no hurry. By that day they might be patrons themselves. Another mere sixty thousand years would be an easy wait.

The signal from the Synthian spy faded. Apparently the fury of the battle was driving her farther from Kthsemenee.

The Acceptor cast about, regretting the loss slightly. But now the glory of battle opened before it. Eager for the wealth of stimulus that awaited it, the Acceptor decided to report on the Synthian later… if it remembered.

33 ::: Thomas Orley

Tom looked over his shoulder at the gathering clouds. It was too soon to tell if the storm would catch him. He had a long way to fly before finding out.

The solar plane hummed along at four thousand feet; the little aircraft wasn't designed for breaking records. It was little more than a narrow skeleton. The propeller was driven by sunlight falling on the wide, translucent wing.

Kithrup's world-ocean was traced below by thin whitecaps. Tom flew to the northeast, letting the tradewinds do most of the work. The same winds would make the return trip — if there were one — slow and hazardous.

Higher, faster winds pushed the dark clouds eastward, chasing him.

He was flying almost by dead reckoning, using only Kithrup's orange sun for rough navigation. A compass would be useless, for metal-rich Kithrup was covered with twisty magnetic anomalies.

Wind whistled past the plane's small conical noseguard. Lying prone on the narrow platform, he hardly felt the breeze.

Tom wished he had just one more pillow. His elbows were getting chafed, and his neck was developing a crick. He had trimmed and retrimmed his list of supplies until he found himself choosing between one more psi-bomb to use at this destination and a water distiller to keep him alive when he got there. His compromise collection was taped to the platform beneath his cushion. The lumps made it almost impossible to find a comfortable position.

The journey was an unending monotony of sea and sky.

Twice he caught sight of swarms of flying creatures in the distance. It was his first inkling that any animals flew on Kithrup. Could they have evolved from jumping fish? He was a bit surprised to find flight on a world so barren of heights.

Of course, the creatures might have been molded by some ancient Galactic tenant of Kithrup, he thought. Where nature's variety fails, sophonts can meddle. I've seen weirder gene-crafted things than fliers on a water world.

Tom remembered a time when he and Gillian had accompanied old Jake Demwa to the Tymbrimi university-world of Cathrhennlin. Between meetings, he and Jill had toured a huge continental wilderness preserve, where they saw great herds of Clideu beasts grazing the grassy plains in precise and complex geometric patterns. The arrangements spontaneously changed, minute by minute, without any apparent communication among the individual animals — like the transient weavings of a moire pattern. The Tymbrimi explained that an ancient Galactic race that had dwelt on Cathrhennlin ages ago had programmed the patterns into the Clideu as a form of puzzle. No one in all time since had ever managed to decipher the riddle, if there actually was one.

Gillian suggested that the patterns might have been adapted by the Clideu for their own benefit. The puzzle loving Tymbrimi preferred to think otherwise.

Tom smiled as he recalled that trip, their first mission as a pair. Since then he and Gillian had seen more wonders than they could ever catalog.

He missed her already.

The local birds, or whatever, veered away from the growing bank of clouds. Orley watched them until they passed out of sight. There was no sign of land in the direction they flew.

The plane was making nearly two hundred knots. That should take him to the northeast chain of volcanic islands he sought in another two hours or so. Radio, satellite tracking, and radar were all forbidden luxuries. Tom had only the chart pinned to his windscreen to guide him.

He'd be able to do better on the return trip. Gillian' insisted he take an inertial recorder. It could guide him blindfolded back to within a few meters of Hikahi's island.

Should the opportunity arise.

The pursuing clouds grew slowly above and behind him. Kithrup's jet stream was really cooking. Tom admitted that he wouldn't mind finding a landing site before the storm reached him.

As the afternoon wore on he saw another swarm of flying creatures, and twice he caught a glimpse of motion in the water below, something huge and sinuous. Both times the thing vanished before he could get a better look.

Scattered among the swells below floated sparse patches of seaweed. Some clusters came together to form isolated mounds of vegetation. Perhaps the flying things perched on those, he thought idly.

Tom fought the tedium and developed a profound hatred for whatever lumpy object lay directly under his left kidney.

The glowering cloudbank was only a couple of miles behind him when he saw something on the northern horizon, a faint smudge against the graying sky.

He applied more power and banked toward the plume. Soon he could make out a dusky funnel. Curling and twisting to the northeast, it hung like a sooty banner across the sky.