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  “You do have a plan,” Leresha said. “Your agreement with the L’liites was shared with us only two days ago. This is not your usual procedure.”

  “What was shared?”

  “The document, in Elysian letters, with your sister’s finger marks.”

  Verid’s forehead turned to ice, and the chill permeated to her fingers. “Her sister” Flors must have made a secret deal with the L’liites. That was why they had settled so quickly. And Hyen had gone along with it—without telling her. How could he stab her in the back that way? How could he imagine they would get away with it? She would resign in protest.

  All of these thoughts passed through her mind over a few seconds. Then she collected herself. She could not help Hyen’s governing style. After all, he had concealed from Flors her meeting with Zheron; and after the trip to Urulan, Flors would have to swallow the result.

  If Hyen survived in office that long ... How his document had leaked was another question. For the moment, Verid was left the unenviable task of defending a major treaty violation. She put her face in her hands, massaging her forehead. “I must consult with my sisters,” she said at last. “If we understand each other correctly, this matter is most—”

  “What is there to consult about?” Ooruwen interrupted, waving her hand. Leresha caught her arm gently. “The violation is clear. Just share good sense with your sisters to clear it up, and that’s all.”

  “That is what I will try to do.” With what success, she had no idea. First of all, she would have to find out what exactly was agreed to. She could not admit, here, the embarrassing extent of her ignorance. “I share your distaste for terraforming. But, realistically, Shora and Urulan are the only two planets colonized successfully in their native state—and neither can support more than a handful of humans.”

  “No world can share more than a webful of humans,” said Ooruwen. “Perhaps it’s time Shora reconsidered the status of our Elysian guests.”

  Abruptly Verid looked up. After forty generations, Sharers could still call Elysians “guests”? “What right do you have to tell us what to do?” Her words tripped with anger. “Who keeps your sky clear of hungry immigrants? What would you do with them all? Have you any idea what it is to feed and shelter billions of people? What do a few alien trees and trilobites count for, in the face of that?”

  “‘Compassion is, loving everyone and eating no one,’” Leresha quoted.

  “Not to the point of madness.” Verid blinked and squinted as rays of sunrise peeked through the window. Outside, a stream of cruel brilliance dribbled across the shoreless sea.

  CHAPTER 16

  Verid returned to Helicon to meet with Hyen and Flors, who was now her equal partner at Foreign Affairs. She could barely focus on the butterflies in the garden, for she had not slept in over twenty-four hours. She got by on medication which would knock her out afterward; in the meantime, she felt as if the world had receded slightly from her vision.

  “What’s this agreement with the L’liites?” she demanded. “Why was I not informed?”

  Flors avoided her eye. “We approved a foreign loan request for Bank Helicon.”

  Verid took a breath. If Iras had anything to do with this ...

  “Bank Helicon made the loan to a Solarian development company.” Solaria was a world of twelve billion, some hundred light-years across the Fold. Hard to reach even by Fold-jumping, Solaria had limited contact with other members of the Free Fold.

  “And?” she prompted.

  “Who cares what the Solarians do with it?” Flors replied testily. “It’ll take a year for the news of the deal even to reach Solaria.”

  “The Solarians,” Hyen admitted, “are expected to pass the funds back to Valedon, which will develop certain ... applications. It’s all research, nothing more.”

  “Great Helix,” Verid exclaimed “You thought you could get away with that?”

  “Why not?” said Flors. “We’ve earned off of Bronze Sky for centuries. Why didn’t Sharers object to that?”

  “They found out too late,” Hyen observed quietly. “It shook them too much.”

  She could see that. By their own reasoning, the Sharers shared the responsibility for what they had failed to prevent—the annihilation of a living world. They were too shocked to face it in full. “Well now, they’ve had eight generations to face up to it; and they’ve got a chance to prevent the next one. Green-eyed flies in Papilion are nothing compared to what’s coming.”

  “Preposterous,” exclaimed Flors. “Look, you know what the L’liite rescheduling just cost us; the banks will be hurting for decades. They badly need healthy assets. How can we afford to give up such a source of revenue? Your own mate made her fortune off Bronze Sky.”

  Accustomed to envy of Iras’s wealth, Verid did not rise to the bait. But if Iras had a finger in the Solaris deal, there would be trouble.

  “You’re right, Flors,” said Hyen. “We need the white hole contracts. How unfortunate the deal leaked.”

  Flors put his hands on the edge of the mooncurve and half rose from his seat. “I tell you, nobody else knew about it.” He looked more agitated than she had ever seen him. “Bank Helicon never leaks. The Solarians took the contract and jumped Fold the same day. The L’liites I informed only in general terms.”

  “The Sharers had an authentic copy of the contract.” Verid had seen it, to her astonishment.

  “No one had access to it.”

  She could see that Hyen did not believe him, and she did not either. Foreign Affairs had had leaks before, although rarely one which involved an official document.

  “That leaves us in a tight spot, doesn’t it.” Hyen sighed. “You’ve authorized a contract that can’t be undone,” he told Flors, “in direct violation of our treaty.” The “you” was emphasized. Hyen had carefully kept his own name off the contract. “I’m afraid, shonsib, that I will most regretfully accept your resignation.”

  So Flors would take the fall. Under other circumstances, Verid would have rejoiced. But now, left alone to defend the terraforming scheme before an ocean of hostile Sharers ... she envied Flors.

  Iras swore she knew nothing of the deal. “I’d never touch terraforming—too high risk.”

  “It’s illegal, damn it,” Verid grumbled, only half-satisfied. “Never mind the risk.”

  “It’s not illegal to lend to Solarians. It was dumb to put the rest in writing. Anyway, I told them I’d have no part of it.”

  “You mean they approached you? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Well you always say, dear, we have to keep our business separate.”

  That was true enough, Verid agreed ruefully.

  For the rest of the day, she got hold of one Sharer affairs expert after another. She even reached Draeg, the purple L’liite at his lab.

  “Can you help us?” she urged him. “You attend the Gathering. You know why we have to terraform. Your own home world will have to send people somewhere.”

  Draeg’s dusky features wore an uncomfortable look. Understandably so, she thought; a typical foreign worker, he was not exactly used to pleas for help from an Elysian Subguardian. “What can I do?” he asked guardedly.

  “Speak for us in the Gathering,” she said. “Try to help them see our case.”

  His lips tightened, and the muscles shifted in his neck. She could sense an internal struggle in the man. “Sharing works both ways,” he muttered. “I begin to see their point. What good is it for us L’liites to make so many people that we have to ship them off? Instead of damming rivers, why don’t you make your loans to the little people, to better themselves so they don’t need extra children just to put them to work? So long as there are worlds to terraform, L’li will stay poor.”

  His frankness startled her. She agreed with him, to a point, but that was no help now.

  She returned to Kshi
ri-el, to catch Leresha once more before the third sundown. “We need time,” she pleaded. “However you found out, this has all been too sudden. Just share some time with us—until the next World Gathering. We’ll work something out, I promise.”

  Leresha barely looked at her. The tangled scars that lined her body seemed to close her off, like a nascent butterfly in its chrysalis. “There is nothing to work out.”

  Verid watched her searchingly. She had known Leresha since before she took her selfname—even before the smooth-complexioned youngster had dived into the nest of fleshborers. “You know me, Leresha. Your mother and grandmother knew me. I defended the right of your ancestors to share a fugitive from Elysium’s highest law.” She paused. “A year, now, will give me time. Elysians are proud to live on a world with a native ecosphere. We can seek alternatives. The ‘contract’ can be ‘renegotiated.’ But we need time.”

  “Time,” repeated Leresha bitterly. “Time is something you Elysians have plenty of. What do you do with it? With ten times our lifetime, are you ten times as wise?”

  For that there was no answer. The wind shrieked across the raft, scattering fallen raftblossoms in its path. “You haven’t answered my questions, either,” Verid reminded her. “Sharers and Elysians, we both need each other.”

  Leresha looked past her. “It would be better that our people shared an ending, than that another world should die.”

  Stunned, Verid had nothing left to say. She walked slowly back upraft, toward the shuttle.

  As she plodded along the mossy raft trunk, three little Sharer children came romping over. The sight of children instantly stripped away centuries, bringing back her decades as generen. She smiled involuntarily. Sharer children looked so funny, with their outsized webbed feet. Turning their heads backward, they shrieked and laughed at something. Verid remembered how Iras longed for a child; odd, for Iras had never cared much for all Verid’s hundred-odd shonlings before.

  The object of the children’s laughter clambered after them, over the raft branch. It was a trainsweep.

  Verid froze in her tracks, suddenly struck with dread. Sharers and servos—an unlikely connection, and yet ... That had been next on her list to take up with Leresha, and now it would be impossible. Just how much contact did the servos have?

  A thought occurred to her. Casually she approached the children, stopping as their path crossed hers. “That’s quite a pet you share, sister,” she called out to the tallest of the girls.

  “Yes, yes!” the girl cried out happily; she must have been eight or nine.

  Verid nodded at the trainsweep, unsure what to call it in Sharer. “I never heard of such a thing—a creature made of non-life, coming to play with Sharers! Does it happen often?”

  The girl stopped to think. “Not often. This one came to stay with us, but then she went home with Hawktalon. Now she’s come back to play with us again, while Hawktalon awaits her baby sister.”

  Of course, it was Raincloud’s trainsweep. She recognized the crayon markings of Raincloud’s children. She sighed with relief; perhaps that was the end of it after all.

  Then another girl leaped up, waving her fingers until the webs flashed. “She had a visitor once, you know! A visitor made of non-life! Remember, sister?”

  “Oh yes,” said the older one. “The visitor walked tall like a person, but her legs were stiff, and she wore a painted face, like this.” She pulled the corners of her mouth into a wide grin and leered comically at the others, who burst into giggles once more.

  A nana, Verid instantly recognized. Nanas, the most advanced and dangerous of servos; and the saddest to treat like servos. Somehow a nana had learned that the Sharers had harbored a fugitive trainsweep. Yet how could a nana get out here, all alone? No generen would allow it....

  Except for Kal.

  Raincloud’s labor had continued for twelve hours. The pain was not particularly bad, and the contractions came with no orderly pattern like the one Blackbear’s medical text described; now a dozen minutes between, then six, then back to nine or ten. ‘Tm always irregular,” she warned the lifeshaper.

  Yshri the Foolish One, with her bald head and oval face, gave her a puzzled look. “Why should you share any greater regularity than the swell of the ocean?”

  Raincloud grinned back appreciatively. They were outside, now, in the protective shadow of the silkhouse, the ocean purring beneath the afternoon sun. The lifeshaper applied living green tendrils which twined around her belly; their secretions dulled the pain without diminishing the force of her tightening.

  Raincloud gripped Blackbear’s hand and smiled at Hawktalon, who sat cross-legged on the raftmoss, holding a statuette of the Dark One. She missed her mother and sisters, who would have joined her chanting the sacred texts of Mu, celebrating the great mystery of creation.

  But the Sharers celebrated too, in their own way. From Yshri’s silkhouse, and from Leresha’s, their sisters collected as the day wore on. The unclothed purple women gathered around her with their flutes and whorlshell horns. They played songs and riddles and shared tales of babies born long ago, entertaining Hawktalon and Sunflower while Raincloud focused on the tightening universe within.

  Blackbear watched her as she paced on the raft branch to help gravity do its work. The sea was lively today, and at times great bursts of spray reached her, bringing welcome relief. For a moment she stopped to rest and catch breath, admiring the piercing blue of Shora’s sky. “You didn’t believe it at first,” she reminded him. “You thought it was the wrong planet.”

  “I still wonder,” he admitted.

  She laughed quietly, then took a breath as the tightening came on again.

  The transition came, with shuddering swiftness, a rising wall of pain that she could only push through, over and over. For an interminable time it seemed that nothing else existed, not even Blackbear’s eyes and the hypnotic voice of the lifeshaper. But the head of the child inside, that she could feel, tunneling out to daylight.

  A cry burst the air, a short gasp of a cry, and a little wrinkled creature flung out its arms and legs. Then the infant was in Blackbear’s arms. He wrapped it in the blanket, the same one that had once wrapped Hawktalon, and then Sunflower. Cradling the infant for a moment, he laid it upon her to find her breast. What a thrill to feel one suck again, for she missed nursing Sunny.

  “It’s a girl,” Blackbear whispered, as the lifeshaper had not seemed to notice. “What good luck for the clan!”

  The lifeshaper apologized, “Sorry about the transition. Some pain is needed, to draw out the little sharer. Otherwise, you’d never let her out.”

  “You’re right, I’ll miss her in there,” Raincloud said half-seriously. “But how much better to see her ...”

  From several feet off came Hawktalon’s voice. “Where’s Mother? Where’s my baby?” She came over and peered at her new sister. “Ooh, she’s little. She’s even uglier than Sunny was.”

  “Hawktalon,” said Blackbear reprovingly. The infant’s head was rather flattened, and her nose was pushed to one side. Her skin was pallid, for the rich darkness of Clicker skin would only come later. But for Raincloud, all of these features became in an instant the highest standard of beauty.

  Sunflower pushed his face eagerly beneath Raincloud’s arm. “It’s my baby,” he insisted. “When can I have my baby?”

  “Does she have a name yet?” Blackbear ventured to ask.

  Raincloud tried to recall her last dreams as she caressed Sunflower’s hair, for a moment overcome by the sense of the two little furry heads on her breast. Then her face wrinkled. “You know what I dreamed of? That trainsweep, clambering over the raft. We can’t very well call her that.”

  “‘Trainsweep!’” Hawktalon exclaimed. “What

  a name!”

  “Anything else?” asked Blackbear.

  She thought hard, dazed with exhaustion. “The sky
was blue, and the sound of the wind was in my ears. Blueskywind.” She heard Blackbear catch his breath. It was a good name for the Windclan, and yet different, for few Clickers ever came to light beneath a blue sky.

  Beyond them the sea gasped against the raft, enveloping everyone with a fine mist. Yshri said, “Now the sea has named her too.”

  CHAPTER 17

  For the next day she rested, awaking only to feed the little one, and herself. During the day, she occasionally let her rock to sleep in a shon: a cradle that floated in a bed of water, swaying as the baby moved. At other times Blackbear hoisted the baby up into a leather pouch secure on his chest. A true rei-gi expert would be able to deflect any attacker while keeping the child safe.

  Verid came to pay Raincloud and her newborn a visit.

  “It’s good to see you, Subguardian.” Raincloud felt a bit nervous, for her milk was coming in, and her breasts leaked beneath her clothes.

  Verid took up the newborn, handling her with surprising ease; a former generen, after all. Blueskywind’s head had rounded up beautifully, and her nose was beginning to spring back. “How alert she is,” Verid said. “Wait till Iras sees her.”

  A particularly big wave crashed upon the raft, and the surface shifted beneath their feet. “The ocean’s getting rough,” Verid added. “The shuttle will take us out before the storm.”

  “That’s okay; we told Yshri we’d stay on.” The Sharers knew what they were doing, she figured.

  “You’ve heard, about the witnessers in Helicon?” Verid asked.

  “I’ve heard nothing since yesterday,” said Raincloud.

  “Sharer witnessers have appeared outside the Nucleus in whitetrance, in the middle of the main thoroughfare. If we don’t work something out, there will soon be more.”