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  Visitors stayed with host families spread around the eight rafts of the cluster. Raincloud came early to stay at Kshiri-el, so that she might avoid an unpredictable shuttle trip when her baby was born. She felt embarrassed to take up precious space in the silkhouse when so many needed to be housed, but Leresha insisted the Gathering was honored to have her. Blackbear took a string of Visiting Days, and each day the children came out to scurry off with Doggie, exploring the raft. The sweet raftblossoms were in bloom, clothing the branches with orange. Raincloud smiled to recall Ooruwen’s description of the “beautiful” orange flies that pestered Papilion.

  As a foreigner, however, she could not attend the Gathering. Only “selfnamers” could take part. Draeg was a rare exception. He had stayed at Kshiri-el through two swallower seasons and had assumed the purple breathmicrobes into his skin. He had just taken a selfname at Kshiri-el, and lost no time letting everyone know about it.

  “So what is your precious ‘selfname,’ Draeg?” Blackbear asked.

  “The ‘Hot-tempered One,’” replied Draeg, his purple face beaming beneath his tousled black hair.

  Blackbear laughed and slapped him on the back. “Brother, you’ve picked the right name for sure!”

  Draeg caught his arm and pulled with a twist, forcing Blackbear down.

  “You’re learning,” Blackbear admitted. “Just don’t let your peaceful Sharers see.”

  “Your rei-gi is peace enough for me. Anyhow, just remember, I get to attend the World Gathering in person, and you don’t. Even the Prime Guardian himself can’t attend.”

  “Nor Verid, either? Then why is she coming?” Blackbear asked.

  “The Elysian delegates get to sit outside and twiddle their thumbs until we send our wordweavers out to convey the Gathering’s will.”

  While the Sharers arrived in their boats, Raincloud felt herself grow tighter every day, until she was sure she could not last another hour. But she expected the child would come late, as her first two had. To relax herself she bathed in a pool between two of the raft branches that extended outward underwater, their shoots thrusting flowers aloft like pond lilies.

  One evening she felt something “pop” underneath. The cervical plug came out, a twisted cord of mucus that floated away. Then the lifeshaper Yshri the Foolish One, who had treated Sunflower that time so many months before, told her she had dilated a finger-width, and to stay out of the water from now on. But still the labor would not start, and she had to avoid submersion until it did.

  Night time on the raft was a spectacular display of stars. On Bronze Sky, Raincloud had never seen more than a star or two beyond the stratospheric cloak of haze. But here, the planet stood exposed to the gaze of a thousand distant suns.

  On the night the Gathering opened, a number of long-necked reporter servos were on hand to watch the Sharers arrive, the machines looking incongruous upon the ocean-watered turf. As the sun touched the horizon with its last burst of fire, the Sharer delegates ascended the gentle rise to the central rim of the raft. They carried “plantlights” to light their way, potted plants with fleshy leaves that glowed upon watering. Soon the bobbing lights disappeared within the craterlike hollow.

  As Draeg had said, the Subguardian herself had to wait at the silkhouse until the Gathering sent their messengers. Verid could have come out from Helicon the next morning, but it was traditional for the Elysians to wait up until the session ended, and she knew she could expect maximum cooperation if she did. She wasted no time, though, catching up with her work via servo-link to the Nucleus.

  Raincloud went to sleep, about the only thing she felt like doing by now. Her breath came in hoarse snores, and she woke frequently with aches in her side and her legs. Even so, she slept better in the fresh ocean air than she had within the synthetic bowels of Helicon.

  She awoke with a web-fingered hand upon her shoulder, Leresha’s lovesharer Eerea. “They’re here,” Eerea whispered.

  Raincloud’s watch showed a little after six in the morning. Groggily she hoisted herself up and felt her way through the unfamiliar corridor of the silkhouse, the green and blue saddle-shape panels of seasilk twisting this way and that. In the meeting room plantlights cast a lovely glow upon the people, all seated Sharer-style upon the floor. Her eyes focused at last to see Verid, and the wordweavers Leresha and Ooruwen, whom the Gathering had appointed to speak with them. Also present was an Elysian woman from Meryllion to address the pollution problem, the butterflies of her talar brilliant red edged with black. Raincloud managed a smile, and Eerea gave her a shell full of delicious warm liquid that helped the sleepiness recede.

  “What a lovely little girl,” Ooruwen exclaimed, admiring Raincloud’s belly. Sharers customarily assumed unborn infants were female. “Such a large head, and such strong, determined legs. Did you ever see such a beautiful child, Leresha?”

  “Never,” Leresha agreed. “I think we’ll see her bright face before the sun sets again.”

  “No, she’s a little devil, that one,” said Ooruwen. “She’ll give her poor mother another sleepless night before she deigns to come out.”

  The two Sharers went on in this vein for some minutes, until Verid asked in turn after their children and grandchildren. Then at last Leresha brought up the “gift” of flies.

  “The Gathering has agreed,” said Leresha, “to share help with our sisters of Papilion and remove the beautiful flies. An attractant pheromone will be spread in the sea surrounding the Elysian dwelling-place. The flies will soon be gone, to make their home on other rafts. No harm will be shared with flies, nor with humans.”

  “Thanks for your help,” said Verid, Raincloud providing the formal translation.

  “We thank you for the opportunity of service,” said Ooruwen graciously.

  Leresha added, “The Gathering was extremely pleased to hear that the ocean ‘music’ will be gone by the next swallower season. The word of Verid Anaeashon shares great respect among us.” Verid’s hard work ahead of time had saved a lot of trouble.

  “Now the silane pollution ...” As the Meryllian delegate responded to the Sharers, Raincloud barely kept awake, dozing off for a moment, then hastily lifting her head. From the corridor a shaft of yellow daylight trickled faintly across the floor.

  It was just before eight in the morning when Tulle arrived from Helicon to explain the genome project. She tried her best to allay the Sharer fears. “Our only aim is to enable parents to determine the genes of their offspring,” she concluded. “Is that so unreasonable? Don’t Sharers value motherhood? There will be no change in our population control.”

  Leresha listened thoughtfully.

  Ooruwen said, “It violates the treaty. In the treaty, Elysians promised to centralize the making of children, and to share all children in common. They renounced motherhood.”

  “That’s not strictly correct,” objected Tulle. “Elysians never renounced motherhood, nor fatherhood for that matter. They promised to limit their population to a ratio of one child per ten adults—far leaner than the Sharer replacement level. Because Elysians do not age, we replace only those who die by accident. But some day, our demographics will again require one-to-one replacement—and it may be sooner than we think. As some of us pass our thousandth birthday, we discover ... complications.”

  Elysian longevity was not perfect, Raincloud knew. This was the main focus of Tulle’s lab; fertility research was a sideline. If older Elysians started dying off, the picture might change.

  “It’s still against the treaty,” Ooruwen insisted. “If you wish to amend the treaty, why not propose this?”

  Verid said carefully, “We do not share that understanding. We see no violation.”

  Leresha said at last, “The letter of the treaty is not violated. But in spirit, the treaty discourages what you propose. Once individuals possess children of their own genes, they swim a stroke toward reproductive freedom.
Remember the delicate weave of the Web.”

  There was silence. The Web, Raincloud reflected; everything depends upon it, and yet, to comprehend it was to look into an abyss.

  Verid asked, “Where does your Gathering stand?”

  After another silence, Leresha said, “Within the Gathering, our views diverge. Some consider your genome project a step in a dangerous direction. But others believe that Elysians ought to experience motherhood, to reclaim this part of their humanity before it is too late.” She paused, allowing Raincloud to translate back for Tulle. Raincloud’s throat caught on the last sentence. “We are deeply divided,” Leresha added, “and what you have shared only accentuates the division. The Gathering, I think, is unlikely to reach unity this year.”

  The Gathering could act only on consensus; a single dissent could block action. This year, there was much dissension. Tulle sighed, her relief evident. Still, Raincloud wondered about the long-term risk of Iras’s investment.

  Raincloud managed a breakfast of steamed crabs and seaweed. Then she promptly went back to sleep until well past midday.

  The light filtered green and blue through the seasilken panels. She breathed heavily as she tried to rouse herself. Pushing aside the pillows she had propped beneath her legs, she dragged herself up and stretched. The silkhouse seemed deserted, not a sound save for the cries of distant fanwings.

  Hawktalon came running in. Her braids flew about her face, and her smile was enough to bring a glow to Raincloud’s heart. The outdoors was so much better for children than that stifling city. “Mother’s awake!” she announced loudly, much to her mother’s embarrassment. “You’d better come quick, Mother. There’s bi-ig trouble.”

  “Yes?” Sunflower must have got into her toys again.

  “It’s the Sharers. They’re in whitetrance.”

  Her pulse quickened, and she felt her belly tighten. Relax, she told herself, although she would have been glad enough to have the baby then and there. “Whitetrance? Who is?”

  “I don’t know. Hurry, come see.”

  She found them outside. Two strangers were seated cross-legged before the silkhouse, their unclothed bodies white as milk, a net of blue veins permeating their skin. The purple breathmicrobes in their skin had bleached out as their metabolism slowed. The minds of the pair would be far away, or deep within, Raincloud was not sure which. Despite herself, she felt her scalp prickle. This was how the The Web had begun; and before that, the battle with Valedon.

  But of course, it could be something much simpler, even a household dispute. Reining in her imagination, she looked politely away. Several reporter servos were on hand, no doubt spinning tales. One stood idle, perhaps done in by the dust and spindrift.

  A Sharer girl came out, younger than Hawktalon. She began to rub lotion into the skin of the two still strangers, presumably to protect them from the sun.

  “Who are they?” Raincloud asked.

  “Sh,” the girl warned.

  With a shock, Raincloud remembered that they might die if an adult disturbed them. She took a hasty step backward.

  “They’re delegates from a far raft,” the girl whispered. “Go ask Leresha.”

  She found Leresha conferring with Verid. Verid’s features were grim, with the hunched look of an owl reluctantly roused during daylight. “I’m sorry,” said Leresha, “I do not yet share permission to discuss it. I can only say that it has nothing to do with our discussions last night; those issues are closed, for this year.”

  “The devil be thanked for that,” Verid muttered. “Whatever those two are upset about, why didn’t it come up sooner?”

  “It ought to have come up much sooner,” Leresha agreed.

  “But why the whitetrance?” Verid insisted. “The point of the World Gathering is to talk things out. Why won’t they tell us about it?”

  “It’s too unspeakable.”

  Verid contacted Hyen, and Flors, and anyone else she could think of. She racked her brain for all the usual sore points: pollution, overfishing, even Kal’s quixotic crusades ... No, it could not be Kal, she thought. He always gave fair warning. But others with a grudge against the Guard had been known to spring something at the Gathering, at just the right moment to cause the maximum amount of trouble.

  At last she checked in with Iras. “You look awful, dear,” Iras exclaimed out of the holocube in her hand. “Your feathers are all rumpled! Get some sleep, or you’ll be sorry.” It was the best advice Verid had got so far, and she took it.

  By dawn the next morning, she had begun round two with Raincloud and the wordweavers. Raincloud, with her swollen face and huge belly, looked frightful; let foreigners have their children, if they had to go through that. But the Sharers, too, looked none the better for their second night’s marathon, she thought with a grim touch of satisfaction.

  Leresha smoothed her hands down her scarified legs. She looked Verid in the eye. “If our treaty is a raft, what is its first branch?”

  Spare us the dialectic, thought Verid; it was bad enough by day. “The first branch is peace,” she replied, “peace, between our people and yours.” The Bronze Skyan dutifully interpreted, back and forth, as if she had grown up on a raft. What a gift for tongues Raincloud had. Somehow, Elysium had to keep her; what price would do it, Verid wondered.

  “And then?” Leresha added.

  “Peace with our neighbors in the Fold.” The treaty prohibited any military establishment upon Shora, or support of those elsewhere. Was that the trouble?

  “If I stand idly by while my sister hastens death, am I a deathhastener?”

  Verid paused. “Not if my hands are tied.”

  “If I provide the weapon, am I a deathhastener?”

  She guessed what was coming. She let out a breath. “Raincloud, dear, you can relax a bit; don’t overtire yourself.”

  Raincloud took the hint and slowed the pace of her interpreting, giving Verid more time to think.

  Leresha continued, “If I ‘finance’ the weapon, am I a deathhastener?”

  “Finance” was a Valan word, its concept alien to the communal Sharers. But they had come to comprehend it well enough. Leresha’s use of the Valan word, rather than the Elysian, confirmed Verid’s guess. “We finance no Valan weapons,” she said guardedly. This was strictly true, although plenty of Elysian cash reached the Valan military via intermediaries.

  “Then what,” asked Ooruwen, “is a ‘white hole’ device?”

  A white hole was a singularity in space-time which spouted matter out of some distant point in space. A few decades before, physicists had discovered a way to generate small white holes which exploded within a fraction of a second. The new technology had developed first as a laboratory curiosity, then a means of earth moving, then an approach to major restructuring of planets.

  About ten years ago, the Valans had started tipping their interstellar missiles with white holes. The missiles ought to have been done away with decades before, after Valedon had joined the Fold. But because of Urulan, the Fold members had looked the other way.

  “White holes are a highly technical subject,” said Verid. “I will call an expert out in the morning.”

  Leresha said, “The mechanism of the device signifies less than the use to which it is put.”

  “The terms of our loan agreements restrict the function of the devices we finance,” said Verid. “Valedon is, however, a sovereign world. If they stretch the restrictions, there is little we can do. As you know, they face a lethal threat from Urulan.” This last sentence gave even Raincloud pause; it was so full of un-Sharer concepts as to be virtually untranslatable. Usually Verid chose her words with greater care, but she was beginning to wear down.

  “That’s all right,” murmured Leresha to Raincloud, for she comprehended the Elysian well enough. “Sharers have long tried to stay out of that which one nest of fleshborers shares with an
other,” she told Verid, with a trace of contempt. “But your loan agreements tell a different story. You will build a white hole device for the specific purpose of planetary ecocide.”

  Verid’s lips parted in silence. Her guess had been only half right. “I don’t understand,” she said, genuinely puzzled.

  Beside her Raincloud tensed and took a deep breath.

  “You’ve had contractions for some time, sister,” Leresha observed to Raincloud. “Yshri is waiting for you.”

  Raincloud nodded, her lips tight. She let Eerea help her up and take her down the tunnels where the lifeshaper Yshri would deliver her child. What a difference from the servo-driven incubators of the shon.

  “We don’t share understanding,” Verid repeated in Sharer after Raincloud had gone. “Elysium has forsworn terraforming since the founding of Bronze Sky, two centuries ago. Some of the ‘loans’ are still being ‘paid off,’ but why bring that up now?”

  The L’liites were pressing the richer worlds to found a new frontier world to take their excess population. But Elysium routinely turned down all such requests for financing, lucrative as they were. A good third of Elysium’s wealth had come from terraforming Bronze Sky.

  “Shora,” exclaimed Ooruwen, “why do you keep sideslipping, like a fish caught in a net? We shared ignorance of the death of Bronze Sky, until it was too late. But now you plan to hasten yet another world.”

  “We have no such plans,” Verid said carefully. Some day, of course, white holes would greatly enhance the power of terraforming. In the past, without white holes, the best that could be done was to focus stellar energy into the biosphere of a planet, boiling its seas and eliminating all but a few microbial life forms. The terrain was little changed, as on Bronze Sky, whose active geology made the planet unattractive to prospective immigrants. But white holes would reshape continents and smooth over fault lines. They could make planets habitable at several nearby stars. Some day, it would have to be done—hopefully well after her own term at Foreign Affairs.