“Adequate for night concealment. Velteyn has no infrared, thank God. And he almost never comes this far west nowadays. Stop your fussing! You’ll stew yourself into cardiac arrest. Where’s your jiriki?”

“I am a foolish, useless old man. I would not be here in the first place if I were able to rule myself through Zen… The nets, if they fail their purpose, the fault will be my own! The dishonor!”

Amerie gave an exasperated sigh. She thrust the cat at Kawai “Take Deej into Madame’s cottage and give her some leftover fish. Then hold her on your lap and close your eyes and pet her and think of an those lovely Tri-D’s that used to come rolling off your assembly lines in Osaka.”

The old man giggled. “A substitute for counting sheep? Yatte mimasu! It may serve to tranquilize me, at that. As you say, there is still time to mount the attack… Come, kitty. You will share your valued negative ions with me.”

He pottered off, but turned after a few steps to say with a sly grin, “However, one incongruity remains. Forgive my flaunting of the obsolete technology, Amerie-san, but even the lowliest electronicist knows that it is quite impossible for negative ions to be cat-ions!”

“You get out of here, Old Man!”

Tittering, he disappeared into the cottage.

Amerie walked down the canyon past the huts and cottages, nodding and waving to the few people who, like herself, could not resist watching the sky while they waited and prayed. The last of the able-bodied men and women had marched off under Uwe’s command three days ago, and the deadline for the optimal two-day assault had come and gone. But there was still time to execute the one-day attack. At dawn tomorrow, it could be that human beings would unite together for the first time on this Exile world to challenge their oppressors.

Oh, Lord, let it happen. Let Madame and the rest of them get here in time!

It was getting cooler as the sun descended, and soon the thermals, those buoyant upwellings of heated air, would fade away completely and the soaring raptors would have to come back to earth. Amerie came to her secret place beneath a low but open-armed juniper and lay down, face to the sky, to pray. It had been such a wonderful month! Her arm had healed quickly and the people… ah. Lord, what a fool she had been to think of becoming a hermit. Hidden Springs folk and the other Lowlife outlaws of the region had needed her as a physician and counselor and friend. Among them she had done the work she had been trained for. And what had become of the burntout case with the self-punishing compulsion to flee into a haven of solitary penitence? Here she could even pray her Divine Office, contemplate in the forest stillness; but when the people needed her, she was there ready to help. And they were there to help. And he was there in the midst of them. It was her dream fulfilled, even in its changing, only now the language that she prayed in was a living one.

The lammergeier flew away to his lair among the high crags and the eagles descended to their roosting trees an hour before the sun set. The kites scattered, having to satisfy their appetites with insects, and even the buzzards disappeared at last, perhaps wondering what had prompted all of them to waste time waiting in the futile hope of sharing the great newcomer’s prey. He alone still circled aloof in the high air, completely disdainful of the vanished thermals.

And Amerie watched him, lying under the tree, watched that distant speck endlessly wheeling that had drawn all the others and then disappointed them. That bird with motionless wings.

Heart pounding, she scrambled to her feet and ran back up the canyon to rout everybody out.

“Stand back! Don’t touch it until the field’s off, for God’s sake!” someone shouted.

The huge thing, still glowing faintly purple, seemed to fill the whole lower end of the canyon. It had descended just as soon as the sky was fully dark, subsonic by a whisker but still shoving a hurricane blast ahead of it that tore bundles of thatch from the roofs and sent poor old Peppino’s geese tumbling like leaves in a gale. It had come to a dead halt no more than two meters above the highest trees, its drooping nose, gull wings, and fan-shaped tail bathed in a crawling network of nearly ultravisible fire. Old Man Kawai, composed now and curtly efficient, had sent several youngsters for wet sacks and ordered the rest of the villagers to stand by the rolls of camouflage netting.

They all watched, awe-struck, as the hovering thing folded its great wings back against its thirty-meter fuselage and delicately felt its way down. It nosed obliquely between a pair of tall firs where there was a minimum of undergrowth, hesitated just barely off the ground, and then let its long legs settle. There was a loud hiss; a few bushes began to smolder and wisps of smoke curled up around the footpads. The skin of the bird went dead black.

Then the people, who had stood as though paralyzed, broke into wild cheers. A number sobbed aloud as they rushed to follow Kawai’s orders, beating out the little fires that had been set by the rho-field and hustling to set up poles and guy-ropes for the nets.

The belly hatch opened and the ladder extruded. Slowly, Madame Guderian came down.

Amerie said, “Welcome home.”

“We have brought it,” said Madame.

“Everything is ready. Exactly as your plan specified.”

Lame Miz Cheryl-Ann, who was two hundred and three and nearly blind, seized one of Madame’s hands and kissed it; but the Frenchwoman hardly seemed to notice. Up above, a word of warning came from within the flyer. A litter was lowered from the hatch by Felice and Richard.

Madame said only, “You are needed, ma Soeur.” And then she turned and walked as in a daze toward her cottage. Amerie knelt down and took one of Martha’s bony wrists. Richard stood there in his ruffled pirate shirt and battered buckskins with fists clenched and tears running down his dirty sun-scorched cheeks.

“She wouldn’t let us come back until the Spear was working right. And now she’s damn near bled to death. Help her, Amerie.”

“Follow me,” said the nun, and they rushed off after Madame, carrying the litter with them, leaving Claude to see that the big black bird of prey was safely bedded down for the night.