That piece was excellent, but it paled beside the other. "This," Gazar had said, swelling up with self-importance, "is a veritable omphoth, carved from its own ivory to show later generations the sort of monsters we had to battle in those ancient days."

To a tree-dweller, Jennifer had to admit, it must have looked like a nightmare come to life. She thought of an elephant's head mounted on a brachiosaur's body, though the ears were small and trumpetlike, the tusks curved down, and the trunk?miraculously unbroken on the figurine?seemed to be an elongated lower lip rather than a nose run rampant. Such details aside, the carved omphoth certainly looked ready to lay waste to whole forests.

Imagining a full-sized one, Jennifer had trouble seeing how the Atheters ever could have killed it. When she had said as much to Gazar, he'd burst into epic verse in a dialect so antique that her translator kept hiccuping over it. Apparently a band of heroes had gone out into the Empty Lands, brought back an immense boulder, somehow manhandled it up into the treetops, and then dropped it on an omphoth's head.

"Thus was the first of the monsters slain," Gazar had declaimed, "giving proof?could be done again." Jennifer remembered staring at her translator; the machine wasn't programmed to produce rhymes like that.

Now, though, she was more interested in the statuette than in the poetry its model had inspired. No matter how many treelords ransacked their collections for Celia Rodriguez, she did not think the master merchant would come up with a finer piece.

How much would the omphoth be worth? Enough to set up an endowed chair of Middle English literature? Jennifer knew she was dreaming. The whole hoard Pacific Overtures was bringing back might be worth something close to that, but her few private pieces wouldn't come close.

She sighed, rewrapped the figurines, and put them in her strongbox. One of these days, she told herself?most likely, just about the time when she would start forgetting her Middle English.

No, that was unfair. She loved the old language?although perhaps it wasn't older, she thought, surprised, than Gazar's hunting epic?and kept fresh her command of it. Fiche and a reader even a journeyman could easily afford.

She settled in with her scientific detective. This tale, part of what was called his memoirs, had to do with horse racing. Jennifer had seen a great many alien beasts on her trading runs, but never a horse. She had to struggle to work out from context what several of the words in the story meant; she was always rediscovering how large a vocabulary Middle English had. Even so, as she usually did, she got the gist of the piece and smiled at finding an exchange that had passed straight into Spanglish.

"'Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?'

" 'To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.'

" 'The dog did nothing in the nighttime.'

" 'That was the curious incident,' remarked Sherlock Holmes."

She finished "The Silver Blaze," loaded the fiche Oxford English Dictionary into the reader so she could look up a few words that had completely baffled her. But her mind kept going back to the dog that had not done anything. She frowned, trying to figure out why.

Then her eyes got wide. She reached under the bunk for her strongbox. She got out the two figurines she had just bought from Gazar. She looked from one of them to the other, then slowly nodded. This had to be how Holmes felt when all the pieces fell together. She quoted him again. "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

"Excuse me, Master Merchant." Jennifer had to say it three times before Celia Rodriguez noticed her. She didn't mind; she was used to that.

Finally Rodriguez looked up from her computer screen. "You want something, Jennifer?" She sounded surprised. Jennifer didn't mind that, either. She usually kept a low profile.

"Yes, I think so, Master Merchant. That is, I think I may know why this forest is shrinking."

Rodriguez slammed a meaty hand down on the panel in front of her. "Well, if you do, that's more than anyone else does. And I haven't seen you doing anything in the way of trying to find out, either. So how do you know? Divine inspiration?"

"No. I?I?" Jennifer had to work to keep her voice audible in the face of such daunting sarcasm. "I?I got the idea from a Middle English book I was reading."

The master merchant groaned. "Jennifer, I don't begrudge anyone a hobby. Tranh Nguyen keeps trying to beat the computer at chess. He'll keep trying till he's 105, if he lives that long. Me, I like to knit. That's even useful, every now and then. I've traded things I've made for more than they're worth. You have your ancient books. They're harmless, I suppose. But what can they possibly have to do with why this forest tract on Athet is getting smaller?"

"It's?a way of thinking. But never mind that now. You're right, Master Merchant, I haven't done much work on the problem till now. I'm sorry. But can you tell me if you have maps that show the boundaries of the forest from a long time ago? Long before we first landed here, I mean: back when the Atheters were first settling this territory."

"I think so, yes." Rodriguez fiddled with the computer. A map appeared on the screen, replacing the chart she had been studying. "As best we can tell now, this is the size of the forest about fifteen hundred local years ago. It started declining then, slowly at first, but more and more rapidly in the past millennium. The process was well under way when humans came here, for reasons we still can't fathom?no great climatic changes, no shifts in the nature of the soil, nothing."

The master merchant checked herself, glanced sourly at Jennifer. "Oh, I'm so sorry. Now you know why, out of your antique books. Enlighten me, please."

Jennifer took a deep breath. If she was wrong now, the fitness report Rodriguez turned in on her would make it next to impossible for her to fly again. After not getting a fair shot at one career, the prospect of washing out of another frightened her more than she was willing to admit, even to herself.

"I think it was?" She spoke so softly that Rodriguez had to lean forward to hear what she was saying. She involuntarily yelped, "?the omphoth."

"The omphoth?" The master merchant looked disgusted. "You come in here, waste my time with this foolishness when I have serious work to do? The omphoth," she said, as if to an idiot child, "have been extinct for a thousand years. You were the one who found that out. How can something that isn't here any more have anything to do with conditions now?"

"By not being here," Jennifer said. Rodriguez snorted and turned back toward the computer screen. "No, wait!" Jennifer said desperately. "The forests really started shrinking a thousand years ago?you said so yourself. And the Atheters here finished wiping out the omphoth a thousand years ago. Don't you think there's a connection?"

"Coincidence," Rodriguez snorted. But she did look at Jennifer again. Now she might have been talking to a clever child. "Be reasonable. The Atheters got rid of the omphoth because they kept eating up the forest. So why is it shrinking now that they're gone?"

"Yes, they ate the trees," Jennifer agreed. "They even ate the horrible fruits that the Atheters can't stand, that none of the animals that are still around want anything to do with. What happens to the fruits that fall to the ground now?"

"They sprout, of course."

"Yes." Jennifer nodded eagerly. She was so full of her idea, she was almost fluent. "They sprout. They sprout under the trees that dropped them in the rain-forest gloom. Not many grow up, and the ones that do only grow up in the same place trees had always been."