"Do you think this idea will be accepted?" William asked.

"You mean do I think people will buy it?" Javelin asked. She sighed. "I can think of easier things to sell. What will it be like? Like a symb?"

"No, no, nothing so drastic as that. We will be unnoticed observers. After a few years we will leave you to your own devices. But you don't have very long. The Invaders will not give you more than a century before they exterminate you from all your Eight Worlds."

"And how many... ah, how many hosts would you need?"

"A few thousand. To get a representative sample. After that, we can learn humanity from each other." He paused. "We know this is a strange request. The fact is, it is the only thing your race has to offer us. It is the only reason we have bothered to send you the things we have discovered and collected over seven million years. We don't need your gold and silver, your paper money, or anything you would see as wealth. We know all your technology. We don't need you as slaves, as a source of food, or as another link in our chain of empire. And we're not interstellar philanthropists. In point of fact, we are invaders. Your race has experienced a second invasion, and this time you welcomed it."

"What do you mean?" It was Vaffa, always alert to danger.

"This has been a long-distance invasion. We now come to the core of the matter, the penalties for nonpayment we mentioned in the first message. Have you ever heard of the Trojan Horse?"

Lilo looked at her friends. Only Javelin was nodding.

"If you were not of a mind to give value for value received you should have been slower to accept us when we came bearing gifts. But we saw no reluctance. We seldom do. It is a nearly universal trait among races to accept what looks to be free.

"The symbs. They were never a great success, but they've been in the Rings for a long time now, and they breed prolifically. There are now upward of one hundred and ninety million symb-human pairs in Saturn's Rings. Each one is a time bomb. If we were to send the proper signal each pair would be fused into a single being, and it would belong to us, not you. They would be ready to carry out the missions they were programmed for many years ago. They can travel from planet to planet, in hibernation, and when they reach human worlds... well, I leave it to your imagination." He sat back, and so did all the others.

Lilo had no trouble imagining it.

Humans lived underground everywhere but Venus and Mars. Those two places would probably be safe, since they had an atmosphere, but everywhere else the symbs could wreak havoc with the surface life-support facilities.

The possibilities multiplied in her mind. It was easy to forget in the day-to-day existence in secure warrens beneath the surface, but the space environment was constantly at war with air-breathing animals. The one advantage had always been that, though the environment was hostile, it was not malevolent. It did not seek with a will to destroy humans. With proper precautions it could be held at bay.

But with millions of saboteurs, soldiers perfectly adapted to the space environment...

She felt sick when she thought of Parameter. She knew a little of the complexities built into a symb which allowed a pair to survive in space. Solstice could change her body at will to meet the needs of almost any situation. It was not hard to believe that she could dissolve the thin dividing line between her own body and that of Parameter, fusing the two of them into one supremely efficient organism. But what would be left of Parameter as a human being? Parameter had told Lilo that though a pair was very close and could almost be thought of as one being, there always remained some part of each that maintained a separate identity. That would be gone now, if the Traders carried out their threat. There would be only Solstice, and on some level Lilo had never completely trusted the symb.

Was that distrust justified? The Traders had not really said so. Was Solstice as much a puppet to the Traders as Parameter, an unwitting potential ally?

Lilo was about to try to find out, but a loud noise interrupted her. It was a siren of some sort, and all the Traders looked up in consternation. Or at least they made the attempt to look worried, though Lilo shivered again to see just how alien they could look while looking just like human beings.

"Just a minute," said William. "Just a minute. There seems to be a problem. I'll..." He stopped, briefly, and suddenly did not look very human at all. His eyes closed, and all his muscles relaxed. Javelin was on her feet, looking anxiously at the walls around them. Vaffa had knocked over her chair and stepped back from the table. Lilo found herself on her feet, too.

When William spoke again, his voice had changed.

"There's been detection of Invader activity," he said, and then his words trailed off into a babble that was meaningless to Lilo, but seemed to worry the Traders. The group stirred uncertainly.

25

Lilo-Diana hung on to the harpoon while the animal headed for the deep ocean. It reached the bottom and leveled out, still swimming strongly.

The adrenalin slowly began to wear away, and Lilo was left with the bitter dregs of defeat. She had not killed the beast, and was not likely to. She was not sure if she had even hurt it.

Eventually she let go and the whale vanished in the blue water in front of her. She floated, neither rising or sinking.

Where did she go from here? Her hand touched the intake valve on her chest. She could turn off the suit and drown quickly. Or she could rise to the surface and strike out for shore. She would probably make it with the suit lung feeding her air, but did she want to?

There was something above her.

Without knowing why, she kicked upward to meet it.

It grew rapidly—(below me now, still falling)—and made no attempt to get away from her. The shape hurt her eyes. Yellow? No, many colors—(a deeper yellow than the billowing clouds that now came into view around me, below me, another of the things like the one I had fallen into so many years before)—all colors and all shapes, contained in one shape.

Her stomach lurched, and she was falling.

I don't know how long I fell, but the question probably has no meaning. I was falling through space and time, and through my own life.

It became no longer possible to know who or where I was. Every second of my life existed simultaneously. I was—

standing on a rocky plain beneath a bright light, and knew I was on the world that used to be called Poseidon, but was now two light-years from the sun.

crying, hopelessly, with a depth of feeling never to be equaled in my life, holding the head of a dead man in my lap.

falling through the Jovian atmosphere.

facing the man called Vaffa, watching his weapon rise in slow-motion, hearing an explosion.

holding a knife in my hand, thinking about suicide.

looking at fish in a spinning, circular tank.

running through trees beneath a burning blue sun, laughing.

talking with a man named Quince in the public bath on Pluto.

sitting in a conference room at the hub of a seventy-kilometer wheel, watching a presentation from an alien race.

feeling an erect penis enter my body, with lights flashing around the walls of my room.

facing Vaffa, his gun coming up to kill me.

coming to life in a pool of yellow fluid.

five years old, holding my mother's hand as we followed the transporter carrying our possessions to a new home.

sitting in the green glow of my computer terminal, studying an interesting interpretation of Hotline data.