Spaced among the houses were carpentry shops where the furniture was fabricated along with the trusses and internal structure for the A-frames. There was a pottery as well. Another craft shop made jewelry. Lawrence found that one easily enough. Skins clustered around it like bees swarming over their queen. Few of the pieces were made from gold or silver or platinum, and none had precious gemstones, but the bracelets and necklace pendants and earrings were all beautiful, handcrafted with care and precision. Most of them had cavities to hold neurotronic pearls. They were all being stuffed into Skin pouches.

Lyaute held court with the village council in what passed for the meeting place, a pavilion created from ten big snow-bark trees planted in a circle, their upper branches closely interlaced to form a broad dome of contiguous leaves that admitted slender ultramarine sunbeams while remaining closed against the rain. The captain was alarmed at the lack of anything valuable enough to qualify as a valid asset. The village did have a doctor, but a quick search of her surgery produced only five or six packets of medicines, all close to their expiration date. As in Stanlake, all serious accidents and illnesses were immediately shipped down to Dixon or on to Memu Bay. When Lyaute asked how many people lived in the village, the council said about six hundred. That was a lot more than the file from Memu Bay's Town Hall indicated. Even so, there weren't enough A-frames to house them all. Because many of us live out in the forest where we gather the webs, the council replied. Directions to such homesteads were not given by grid reference, they were in the form of walk half a kilometer along the northwest path, take a right-hand turn and walk for another kilometer, then ford the stream and head for the second peak to the south...

Lawrence was pretty sure the villagers were quietly making fun of the captain. But he had to admit this kind of community was unlikely to have anything Z-B could want. Like Dixon's aluminum ingots, sweaters, however colorful, were not a viable starship cargo.

The captain decided to send Platoon 435NK9 out to the wool center to check on the technology level employed. As it was a little way outside the village he called for guides. In spite of the now-blatant looting that was going on in the A-frame houses and craft workshops, the group of villagers accompanying them remained cheerful and polite. When their great-grandparents first settled this area, they told the Skins, they had brought bulldozers and concrete and dammed one of the larger streams fed by the snowfields on Mount Henkin high above. A hydro plant built into the base of the dam provided the village and the wool center with all the electricity they needed. Their own small tool shop could fabricate any replacements for the hydro system, making them almost self-sufficient.

The wool center was history with a vengeance for Lawrence: five airy wooden barns filled with old-fashioned machinery busily whirring away. Piles of big willow webs were being combed out and spun into yarn. Dyeing vats bubbled away. Bobbin winders clattered.

When it was compacted into strands and knitted together, willow wool made excellent water-resistant clothing. A fleet of small vans took the sweaters and ponchos and blankets down to Memu Bay, coming back with food and consumer goods. Unlike the aluminum trucks from Dixon, they'd continued making the run after the starships arrived. When he looked at a few of the sweaters coming off the knitting machines, Lawrence thought the patterns were conservative, nothing like as bold as the ones Jackie designed.

Three of the Skins draped sweaters around their shoulders. Lawrence didn't bother. He was scanning the area, still suspicious. The whole village idyll setup was just a little too perfect.

"Where does that path lead?" he asked one of the villagers. Where the road to the village headed off from the wool center, a small footpath disappeared into the forest "Just to the lake."

"It's well used." His sensors were showing him multiple overlapping footprints in the drying mud, and the smaller branches of undergrowth on either side were cut back.

"What have you got, Lawrence?" Kibbo asked.

"Path to the lake, he says."

"What's at the lake?" Kibbo asked the villager.

Lawrence watched the slight smile form, then vanish on the man's face. He was going to say water, Lawrence knew.

"There is a temple at the lake, that's all."

"A temple?" Kibbo said. "What sort of temple?"

"It is a place of tranquillity, where one goes to meditate in solitude."

Kibbo conferred with Ntoko for a minute. "Okay, let's go check it out," the sergeant said.

"As you wish."

The villager's name was Duane Garcia. He was in his late forties, with thick curly black hair and a slightly rounded face to which a smile came easily. He was healthy and fit-looking in that way all people who led and relished outdoor lives appeared to be. Thinking back, Lawrence hadn't yet seen a villager who lacked vitality. Even the elderly ones seemed unrestricted by their age, while the little kids were like a gang of unruly miniature angels.

It started raining heavily as the four Skins and two villagers trudged down the path. Mud splattered Lawrence's legs up to his crotch. The droplets messed up half of his helmet sensors, producing blurred visual images.

Duane Garcia pulled his sweater's hood up over his head and whistled happily.

"Who's this temple dedicated to?" Kibbo asked.

"We don't worship gods," Duane said. "The universe is a natural phenomenon."

"Amen to that," Lawrence said.

"So why the temple?" Kibbo persisted.

"It's not a temple in the standard sense. We call it that because the architecture is a homage to some of Earth's historic buildings. The man who designed and built it was a good friend of my grandfather. Apparently he was quite upset when people started calling it the temple."

They topped a small rise, and the forest fell away along with the ground. Beneath them was an alarmingly steep slope that led down into a heavily forested little valley. It was vistas like this that gave rise to the notion of Shangri-la. And Lawrence could well understand why. Mount Kenzi, the second-largest of the Mitchell peaks, stood guard at the far end, a tremendous rugged wall of rock whose upper reaches were cloaked in a thick layer of snow. Below the frostline, waterfalls tumbled hundreds of meters down its sides to vanish into the upper strata of forest with a continuous explosion of white spray englobed by rainbows. The valley itself was the gulf between two of Kenzi's buttresslike foothills, with a river running its length. Tributaries slithered along the base of every crease in the land.

Directly below where they stood was a perfectly circular crater lake that had bitten slightly into the northern wall, resulting in a crescent cliff. A small island rose out of the center, like the back of some slumbering marine giant. At its highest it could only have been a few meters above the surface of the lake. A few trees grew around the edges, their sun-bleached roots struggling for purchase among the boulders.