He checked his watch. The delay had been less than fifteen seconds. All she'd done, obviously, was start the program before she answered him. He felt ashamed of himself. The fighting had screwed up his time sense.

He hoped he hadn't waited too long. T'Kai warriors fought desperately to keep the M'Sak from enlarging the two or three lodgments they had on top of the wall and to keep them from dropping down into D'Opt. If the southerners broke now, nothing could save them. But if he'd told Jennifer to start before the eclipse was total, odds were her scheme would have been wasted.

Too late for ifs now, anyhow. He wondered how long things would take at the Flying Festoon's end. When he judged the moment ripe, he started the tape that was loaded into his translator. The amplifiers around the wall made all the battle din, all V'Zek's shouts, seem as whispers beside his voice. "The very heavens proclaim the glory of T'Kai! Look to the sky, you who doubt, and you will see the truth writ large on the face of the moon itself!"

The message repeated, over and over. In the spaces between, the master merchant heard what he most hoped for: quiet. T'Kai and M'Sak alike were peering upward with all their eyes.

"Hurry up, Jennifer, dammit," Greenberg muttered. He made sure the translator could not pick up what he said.

"… Look to the sky, you who doubt, and you will see the truth writ large on the face of the moon itself!" That roar might have been enough to frighten the M'Sak troops, had they not heard it before. More Soft One trickery, V'Zek thought, and handled as ineptly as the rest of their stunts.

Nevertheless, he looked. He could not help it, not with that insistent great voice echoing and re-echoing on his tympanic membrane. The moon remained dim and bronze?alarming, but alarming in a familiar way.

V'Zek laughed, loud and long. The last bluff had failed. No one but the f'noi in the sky could harm the moon, and from the f'noi it always won free in the end.

"Lies!" V'Zek shouted. "Lies!"

And as he watched, as he shouted, the moon changed.

A light-sail is nothing more than a gauze-thin sheet of aluminized plastic, thousands of kilometers across. When fully extended, it holds photons' energy as a seaboat's sail traps the wind. As it needs no internal power source, it makes a good emergency propulsion system for a starship.

Normally, one thinks only of the light-sail catching photons. No one cares what happens to them afterward. Jennifer did not think normally. A corner of her mouth twisted?on that, no doubt, she and Greenberg would agree. She'd realized the light-sail could also act as a mirror, and, with the ship's robots trimming it, a mirror of very special shape.

She'd been ready for more than a day. She was, in fact, reading when Greenberg called her, but she wasted no time getting things under way. The adjustment was small, tilting the mirror a couple of degrees so the light it reflected shone on L'Rau's moon instead of streaming past into empty space.

As soon as she was sure the robots were performing properly, she went back to rereading "The Man Who Sold the Moon."

The wait seemed to stretch endlessly. The M'Sak were not going to pause much longer, Greenberg thought, not with their chieftain screaming "Lies!" every few seconds. Then golden light touched the edge of the moon, which should have stayed bronze and faint upwards of another hour.

The light stayed at the edge only a moment. Faster by far than L'Rau's patient shadow, the radiant grasping-claw hurried to its appointed place in the center of the moon's disk, so that it became a celestial image of the emblem of T'Kai.

The warriors of the confederacy suddenly pressed against their foes with new spirit. The humans had promised a miracle, but few, Greenberg knew, believed or understood. Asking a planet-bound race to grasp everything starfarers could do was asking a lot. But since the prodigy worked for them, they were glad enough to accept it.

As for the M'Sak? "Flee!" Greenberg shouted into the translator. "Flee, lest the wrath of heaven strike you down!" The barbarians needed little urging.

"Hold fast!" V'Zek shrieked. A warrior ran by him. The warrior also shrieked, but wordlessly. All his eyes were on the moon, the horrible, lying moon. V'Zek tried to grab him. He broke away from the chieftain's grip and ran on. V'Zek swung a hatchet at him, but missed.

The chieftain's mandibles ground together in helpless fury. Moments before, he had led an army fine enough to satisfy even him. Now it was only a mob, full of fear. "Hold fast!" he cried again. "If we hold, we will win tomorrow."

"They will not hold," Z'Yon said softly. Even the shaman, curse him, had three eyes on the sky. "And tomorrow, there will be ambuscades behind every tree, every rock. We daunted T'Kai before. Now we will be lucky to win back to our own forests again."

V'Zek's eyestalks lowered morosely. The shaman was likely right. The M'Sak had gone into every fight knowing these effete southrons could never stand against them. And they never had. But now?now the T'Kai, curse them, knew the very heavens fought for them. Worse, so did his own warriors.

He turned on Z'Yon. "Why did you fail to warn me of this?"

"My master?" Z'Yon squawked, taken aback. Too taken aback, in fact, for he blurted out the truth. "My master, I did tell you the moltings indicated the need for caution?"

"A pestilence on the moltings!" Before V'Zek was aware of willing his grasping-claw to strike, the hatchet he carried leaped out and crashed through Z'Yon's shell, just to the left of the shaman's center pair of eyestalks. Z'Yon was dead almost before his plastron hit the ground.

V'Zek braced and pulled the hatchet free. Killing Z'Yon, he discovered, solved nothing, for the shaman's words remained true. There was no arguing him out of them any more, either. And a little while later V'Zek, like his beaten, frightened warriors, fled north from D'Opt.

Until the sky-f'noi began to relinquish its grip on the moon, the hateful emblem of T'Kai glared down at them. Forever after, it was branded in their spirits. As Z'Yon had foretold?another bitter truth?few found home again.

L'Rau's sun grew visibly smaller, visibly fainter in the holovid tank as the Flying Festoon accelerated toward hyperdrive kick-in. Jennifer waited eagerly for it to disappear. Civilization lay on the other side of the starjump. "Back to the university," she said dreamily.

Bernard Greenberg heard her. He chuckled. "I won't miss L'Rau myself, I tell you that. Anytime you have to bring off a miracle to get out in one piece, you're working too hard."

He spoke to her differently now; he had ever since she'd brought the Flying Festoon back to the planet. He'd kissed her then, too, where before he'd hardly seemed to notice her as anything save a balky tool. But I'm not balky any more, she realized: she'd proved herself a part of the crew worth having. A kiss of acceptance was worth a hundred of the sort men tried to press on her just because of the way she looked.

"Speaking of miracles, that eclipse was visible over a whole hemisphere," Koniev said. "I wonder what G'Bur who've never heard of T'Kai made of it." He took a sip of ship's vodka. For once he was not complaining about it?a measure of his relief.

"Giving the next generation's scribes and scholars something new to worry about isn't necessarily a bad thing," Marya said. She moved slowly and carefully, but X-rays said she had only an enormous bruise on her shoulder from a slingstone, not a broken collarbone. Left-handed, she raised her glass in salute. "Speaking of which, here's to the scholar who got us out." She drank.