"Look," Cley said, "how do you talk to Vanamonde?"

             "Badly. To reach it we must step through the thicket of the Ur-human mind-set."

             "Thicket?" Cley asked.

             "A swamp is perhaps a better term. It is ingrained in Vana-monde's being."

             "It has some of us in it?" Cley felt a spurt of elation. This was at least some mark her kind had left in the great ruined architecture of time.

             "In the growing struggle, speed is essential. To link our own abilities with Vanamonde requires connections only you and your kind can make."

             Cley's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "The Ur-humans you manufactured?"

             "Yes, they will be used. Seranis and the others of Lys have schooled them in the talent, a labor of great difficulty in such a short time."

             "You're manufacturing us, using us like, like—"

             "Of course." Alvin was unbothered. "That is in the nature of the hierarchy of species."

             "You have no right!"

             "And we have no wrong."

             Seeker made a rude noise and twisted its mouth into an unreadable shape. Clay realized that it conveyed human expressions only when it wished to.

             "There is no moral issue here," Alvin went on, casting an irritated glance at Seeker. "These matters transcend the concept of rights. Those ideas attach to strategies societies use to maintain order and station. As concepts they have no validity in the transactions across the gulf that separates us." Alvin smiled, as though he knew this was the sort of thing Ur-humans did to take the edge off a stark statement.

             Cley said, "That's incredible. We have an obligation to each other, to treat everyone as holding natural rights."

             Natural to what? Seranis sent.

             Cley answered. To anything and anybody who can think.

             Think what? These are not times like those in which your kind evolved. Now there are many beings, large and small, who carry self-awareness.

             Cley covered her own inner confusion with. Then they have to be accorded their own dignity.

             Dignity does not mean they can step outside the inherent ordering ordained by evolution's hand. Seranis gave Clay a look of concern, but in her striations of quick thought there was an underlayer of annoyed impatience.

             "Look, I have to think about all this," Cley said.

             Alvin said, "There is no time for the kind of thinking you do. The moment is upon us."

             Cley turned to Seeker. "What should I do?"

             Seeker smacked its lips as though hungry. "I do not subscribe to their ideas. Or to yours. Both are too simple."

             "Seeker, I need support from you."

             "Your actions I can assist, perhaps," it said. "It is true, as the Supras say, that your innate abihties are needed."

             "No, I didn't mean help with their fight. I want you to—well, tell them they're wrong, that they're treating my people like, like animals. "

             "I am an animal. They do not treat me as you."

             "You're not an animal!"

             "I am not remotely human."

             "But you're, you're . . ."

             "I am like you when I need to be. But that is to accomplish an end."

             "What end?" Cley asked, her confusion deepening.

             "To bring you here at this time. To unite you with Ur-humans, as I promised." It glanced at Alvin and Seranis. "I knew the Supras would probably fail to do so."

             Across Alvin's face flitted an expression Cley could not read, but the nearest equivalent was a mixture of irritation and surprised respect. Alvin said warily to Seeker, "It would have been simple to bring you here, had the Mad Mind not managed to learn how to enter our ships. And you could not have known it would understand that so quickly, much less that it could find these Ur-humans among all the ships we have."

             "I could not?" Seeker grinned.

             Cley felt something pass between Seeker and the Supras, a darting note of complex thought. "Seeker! You have the talent."

             "Not your talent. But no matter." Seeker turned to Cley. "I believe this issue must be resolved now, so I shall do it."

             Alvin said sternly, "I cannot allow so crucial a matter to—"

             "Do as they say," Seeker said to Cley.

             "But I—"

             "If you wish to think in terms of the structure of rights, then consider a point." Seeker brought a nut toward its mouth but fumbled and dropped it. "The others of your kind—and I do not believe they are your 'people,' for they are not yet people at all—will certainly die if you do not."

             Alvin scowled. "You can't be sure of that."

             Seeker did not immediately answer. Instead it pulled the carcass of a small rodent from a snag in its pelt and began to casually gnaw on it. The Supras all looked askance at this. Cley remembered how delicate and rarefied their own food had been, like eating clouds.

             Seeker licked the carcass sensuously and said, "You remember the era of simple laws?"

             Alvin frowned. "What? Oh, you mean the age when science discovered all the laws governing the relations between particles and fields? That time is of no relevance now."

             Seeker closed one eye and let one side of its face go slack, as if it could slip halfway into sleep. Cley wondered if this was some arcane joke.

             Seeker said, "The Ur-humans found all such laws. But to know how gravity pulls upon a body does not mean even in principle that you can foresee how many such bodies will move. The prediction of any real system is beyond the final, exact reach of science."

             Alvin nodded, but Cley could tell that he did not see where this subject led. Neither did she. And time was running out, she thought with irritation, while these two argued over grand principles.

             "True," Alvin said, "but that is ancient philosophy. Quantum uncertainty, chaos—these forever screen precise knowledge of the future from our eyes."

             Still with one eye closed, Seeker said "And what if this were not so?"

             "Then we Supras would have discovered that long ago," Alvin insisted. "Such knowledge would reside in the lore of Diaspar."

             Seeker blinked with both eyes and animation returned fully to its face. At the same moment Cley felt a burst of talent-talk like unrecognizable bass notes. Some Supras stirred uneasily. She realized that Seeker had complied—it had sent some sort of message while carrying on this lofty discussion.

             Seeker said, "Much has been discovered since strata of learning were laid down in Diaspar."

             A note of doubt entered Alvin's voice. "The humans who came after our kind, those who left—they found such ability?"

             Seeker said, "No. That is not open to your order of being."

             "Beast, are there higher orders which know science?" Alvin looked around at his fellow Supras, who seemed distantly amused by this conversation.