Lena Strong laughed out loud.

“Oh, he’s a wonder, Danel. What a theory. If only it were true!”

Dwer lifted a hand to his head. The vibration of the water wheel seemed labored, uneven. “Well? What is true?” he demanded testily, then stared at the expression on Ozawa’s face. The older man answered with a brief eye-flick heavenward.

“No,” Dwer whispered.

He felt strangely remote, detached.

“Well then iz all over, an’ I’m out of a job — no?”

The two humans grabbed his arms as he let go of the thing that had kept him going until now, the force that had dragged him upward out of unconsciousness in the first place: duty.

Galactics. Here on the Slope, he thought as they bore his weight back down the hall. So it’s come at last. Judgment Day.

There was nothing more to do. No way he could make any difference at all.

Apparently, the sages didn’t agree. They thought fate might yet be diverted, or at least modified somehow.

Lester Cambel and his aides are making plans, Dwer realized the next morning as he met the two humans again, this time by the shore of the forest-shrouded mountain lake. Even the dam wore trees, softening its graceful outline, helping root the structure firmly to the landscape. Stretched out on an elegant wooden bench, Dwer sipped a cool drink from a goblet of urrish glass as he faced the two envoys who had been sent all the way to see him.

Clearly the leaders of Earthling-Sept were playing a complex, multilayer game — balancing species self-interest against the good of the Commons as a whole. Bluff, open-faced Lena Strong seemed untroubled by this ambivalence, but not Danel Ozawa, who explained to Dwer the varied reactions of other races to the invaders being human.

I wish Lark had stayed. He could have made sense of all this. Dwer’s mind still felt woozy, even after a night’s restoring sleep.

“I still don’t get it. What are human adventurers doing out here in Galaxy Two? I thought Earthlings were crude, ignorant trash, even in their own little part of Galaxy Four!”

“Why are we here, Dwer?” Ozawa replied. “Our ancestors came to Jijo just decades after acquiring star drive.”

Dwer shrugged. “They were selfish bastards. Willing to endanger the whole race just to find a place to breed.”

Lena sniffed, but Dwer kept his chin raised. “Nothing else makes sense.”

Our ancestors were self-centered scoundrels — Lark had put it one day.

“You don’t believe the stories of persecution and flight?” Lena asked. “The need to hide or die?”

Dwer shrugged.

“What of the g’Keks?” Ozawa asked. “Their ancestors claimed persecution. Now we learn their race was murdered by the Inheritors’ Alliance. Does it take genocide to make the excuse valid?”

Dwer looked away. None of the g’Keks he knew had died. Should he mourn millions who were slaughtered long ago and far away?

“Why ask me?” he murmured irritably. “Can anything I do make a difference?”

“That depends.” Danel leaned forward. “Your brother is brilliant but a heretic. Do you share his beliefs? Do you think this world would be better off without us? Should we die out, Dwer?”

He saw they were testing him. As a top hunter, he’d be valuable to the militia — if he could be trusted. Dwer sensed their eyes, watching, weighing.

Without doubt, Lark was a deeper, wiser man than anyone Dwer knew. His arguments made sense when he spoke passionately of higher values than mere animal reproduction — certainly more sense than Sara’s weird brand of math-based, what-if optimism. Dwer knew firsthand about species going extinct — the loss of something beautiful that would never be recovered.

Maybe Jijo would be better off resting undisturbed, according to plan.

Still, Dwer knew his own heart. He would marry someday, if he found the right partner, and he would sire as many kids as his wife and the sages allowed, drinking like a heady wine the love they gave, in return for his devotion.

“I’ll fight, if that’s what you’re askin’,” he said in a low voice, perhaps ashamed to admit it. “If that’s what it takes to survive.”

Lena grunted with a curt, satisfied nod. Danel let out a soft sigh.

“Fighting may not be necessary. Your militia duties will be taken up by others.”

Dwer sat up. “Because of this?” He motioned toward the bandages on his feet and left hand. Those on the right were already off, revealing that the middle finger was no longer the longest, a disconcerting but noncrippling amputation, healing under a crust of traeki paste. “I’ll be up and around soon, good as ever.”

“Indeed, I am counting on it.” Ozawa nodded. “We need you for something rather arduous. And before I explain, you must swear never to inform another soul, especially your brother.”

Dwer stared at the man. If it were anyone else, he might have laughed scornfully. But he trusted Ozawa. And much as Dwer loved and admired his brother, Lark was without any doubt a heretic. “It’s for the good?” he asked.

“I believe so,” the older man said, in apparent sincerity.

Dwer sighed unhappily. “All right then. Let’s hear what you have in mind.”

Asx

The aliens demanded to see chimpanzees, I then marveled over those we brought before them, as I if they had never seen the like before.

“Your chimps do not speak! Why is that?”

Lester proclaims mystification. Chimpanzees are capable of sign language, of course. But have other traits been added since the Tabernacle fled to Jijo?

The invaders seem unimpressed with Lester’s demurral, and so are some of our fellow Sixers. For the first time, i/we sense something hidden, deceitful, in the manner of my/our human colleague. He knows more than he tells. But our skittish rewq balk at revealing more.

Nor is this our sole such worry. Qheuens refuse to speak further regarding lorniks. Our g’Kek cousins reel from the news that they are the last of their kind.  And all of us are appalled to witness alien robots returning to base laden with gassed, sleeping glavers, kidnapped from faraway herds for analysis under those once-gay pavilions we lent our guests.

“Is this the return of innocence, promised in the Scrolls?” Ur-Jah asks, doubt dripping like fumes from her lowered snout. “How could a blessing arise out of base crime?”

If only we could ask the glavers. Is this what they wanted, when they chose the Path of Redemption?

Lark

“Well, look who it is. I’m surprised you have the nerve to show your face around here.”

The forayer woman’s grin seemed at once both sly and teasing. She peeled off elastic gloves, turning from a glaver on a lab bench with wires in its scalp. There were several of the big trestle tables, where human, g’Kek, and urrish workers bent under cool, bright lamps, performing rote tasks they had been taught, helping their employers test animals sampled from sundry Jijoan ecosystems.

Lark had dropped his backpack by the entrance. Now he picked it up again. “I’ll go if you want.”

“No, no. Please stay.” Ling waved him into the laboratory shelter, which had been moved to a shielded forest site the very night Lark last saw the beautiful intruder, the same evening the black station buried itself under a fountain of piled dirt and broken vegetation. The basis for both actions was still obscure, but Lark’s superiors now thought it must have to do with the violent destruction of one of the interlopers’ robots. An event his brother must have witnessed at close hand.

Then there was the testimony of Rety, the girl from over the mountains, supported by her treasure, a strange metal machine, once shaped like a Jijoan bird. Was it a Buyur remnant, as some supposed? If so, why should such a small item perturb the mighty forayers? Unless it was like the tip of a red qheuen’s shell, innocuous at first sight, poking over a sand dune, part of much more than it seemed? The “bird” now lay in a cave, headless and mute, but Rety swore it used to move.