No attack had come by the time Kutzko started us down the hill again. I tried to watch the scattering of other thunderheads over my shoulder as we came within sight of them, but we were too far away and jolting too wildly for me to read anything of consequence. All I could get was the sense that they, too, were watching. "What now?" I asked.

Lord Kelsey-Ramos took a deep breath, the tension flowing out of him to leave a tired anger in its place. "We head back," he said wearily. "Head back, and tell Admiral Yoshida and the rest of the commission just how the thunderheads have been using us all these years."

I felt my stomach muscles tighten. "I still don't understand."

He turned grim eyes on me. "Don't you see? That—" he jerked his head sharply back at the hillside behind us—"was a demonstration of the thunderheads' natural defense mechanism. A mechanism they simply adapted for their system as a whole."

And, finally—finally—it was clear. "The Cloud," I breathed. "It's nothing but a gigantic version of that plant barrier."

Lord Kelsey-Ramos nodded bitterly. "And we're the stinging insects that live there. The insects they've lured in to defend them."

Temperatures the previous night had dipped toward freezing, a sure sign that winter would be arriving in this part of Spall. Even now, four hours after sunrise, the air was still respectably chilly—a fact that clearly weighed upon the minds of the engineers working hard to prepare the new housing area that was being added onto the compound. I watched them as I walked, finding it a little hard to remember the encampment as it had been at the beginning. From a single Pravilo ship and a handful of soft-wall structures, its occupants grudgingly investigating the babblings of a pair of pravdrugged Watchers, it had now become a veritable city of offices, labs, and prebuilt individual houses.

And somewhere in all that influx of money and personnel, I could sense that something had gotten lost. The pure, almost childlike excitement of scientific discovery was all but gone now; in its place was the equally strong but far darker motivation of being part of an important, life/death problem.

Dr. Eisenstadt, though he wouldn't admit it aloud, could feel that loss. Many of the others didn't. For some, bigger and more important and better funded was always the definition of progress.

The house I was looking for was just inside the original security fence, about as far from the main work areas as it was possible to get at the moment. Like all the other houses in the cramped and inadequate space, there wasn't a great deal of land surrounding it; but as I neared the front door I could tell from the faint whiffs of familiar vegetation that there was enough room between house and fence for at least a small garden. The muted sound of metal implements on dirt accompanied the smells, and I changed direction to circle around that way.

Shepherd Adams was on his knees in the middle of a small section of turned dirt, poking with a fork trowel around the roots of three knee-high plants. He looked up as I came around the corner of the house, and for that first unguarded instant his sense was full of unfriendliness, vague bitterness, even betrayal. "Mr. Benedar," he nodded, his voice tightly neutral.

"Shepherd Adams," I nodded back, fighting to hold my ground against the strong feelings radiating from him. "I'm sorry to intrude on your privacy—"

"I have little else these days except privacy," he countered.

There was just a hint of irony in his voice; a chink in the armor he was trying to throw up around himself... "Gives you an idea of what it would be like to be a monk," I offered. Another flicker in his sense— "As you once considered becoming."

He snorted gently, another chunk of the armor coming down. Adams simply wasn't constituted to hold onto grudges. "I'd forgotten how little one's thoughts are one's own in the presence of a Watcher," he sighed. "It's a hard reminder of how open we always are to God."

I looked at him, read the quiet pain there. "I'm sorry," I said softly. "Sorry for... everything."

He favored me with a bittersweet smile, a portion of the anger within him turning back against himself. "You mean for your part in exposing the Halo of God as a lie?"

I flinched at the bluntness. "A mistake, Shepherd Adams. Not a lie."

He grimaced. "Was it? I've spent the last month wondering about that. After all, we both know the Halo of God wouldn't have grown as large or as quickly without the mystical allure we presented—the chance to actually stand here on the very physical manifestation of God's kingdom." He dropped his eyes away from mine. "Who's to say I didn't deliberately blind myself to the inconsistencies in that claim?"

I shook my head. "For whatever it's worth, I looked very hard for signs of perverted ambition when we first met—and Calandra looked even harder. Neither of us found any."

His lip twitched. "Calandra never really trusted us, did she?"

I thought about Calandra's admitted loss of faith. "She has a hard time trusting anyone these days," I told him.

He nodded. "I suppose it comes of being a Watcher living after the darMaupine's fiasco." Lowering his eyes, he tapped one of the plants with his fork trowel. "Know anything about valeer plants, Gilead?" he asked.

The name was vaguely familiar. "They provide one of the spices you use in cooking, don't they?"

He nodded. "I found these growing inside the fence after Dr. Eisenstadt's people decided they didn't need me and buried me out of the way back here. Tricky sort of plant to harvest, actually—something we discovered the first time we tried it." He gestured at five fat leaf-like structures at the top of one of the plants. "These are the spice pods," he identified them. "What happens is that, as winter approaches, the plant's entire supply of nutrients—its life-force, if you will—is drawn into the seeds in these pods. By the time the process is complete, the plant has become a dead stalk, and at that point the next wind just blows it apart, scattering the seeds all over the landscape. The trick for the gardener is to wait long enough to get the maximum yield, yet not so long that the wind destroys the harvest."

I looked at the plant, seeing the analogy he was making. "Perhaps it's now time for the Halo of God to scatter," I suggested.

"Oh, they'll scatter, all right," he sighed. "But not as viable seeds. They're too young, most of them, to withstand something this hard."

"You think it'll be harder on them than Aaron Balaam darMaupine was on us?" I countered, suddenly angry at his defeatist attitude. "The Watchers have been considered little better than dormant traitors by much of the Patri and colonies for the past two decades. Yet we survive."

He smiled bitterly. "You were old and established, and faced suspicion and hatred. We are young, and face ridicule. Which do you think the human spirit can more easily withstand?"

I knew the answer to that one. All too well. "Don't underestimate them," I said instead. "They may be stronger than you think."

His gaze drifted to the security fence. "I should be out there with them," he murmured. "Preparing them for this."

I took a deep breath. "You may be of more value here."

He shrugged. "I'm of no use at all. Shepherd Zagorin seems to be—" He broke off, eyes shifting back to me as his brain belatedly noticed the tone of my comment. "Has something happened to her?"

"No, she's fine," I assured him. "She's still handling all the contact work, but she seems to be acclimating to it well."

He snorted. "There's no need for her to be doing all of it alone," he growled. "They fixed my heart and brain weeks ago—I'm perfectly capable of taking some of that load off her."