“We need to learn more of the situation here as well,” Bryusov said.

“So we do.” They could not hope to learn enough, either, Tolmasov thought, not in the limited time they had on Minerva. In the end, they might act anyway. People did things like that.

“Shall we tell the Americans?” Bryusov asked.

“We’ll let Moscow worry about that, too,” Tolmasov decided. “If it were my choice, though, I’d say no, at least not yet.”

Reatur finished cleaning the chamber where the new budlings had burst into the world. It was somber work. That was one of the reasons he did not give it to the mates. The other, of course, was simply that, being as they were, they would have done a bad job of it.

He dragged Biyal’s corpse out of the room, toward the door that kept the mates in their own part of the castle. The evening was growing dark, and he hoped the mates would be back in the little rooms where they slept.

Seventeen evenings out of eighteen, they would have been. Even tonight, most of them were. But Numar and Lamra were still chasing each other up and down the hall. They came to a stumbling stop when they saw the domain master and his burden.

“It’s Biyal,” Numar said.

“How sad,” Lamra echoed. But she did not sound full of grief, no more than if she were speaking of a broken pot or, at most, a dead animal she did not care much about one way or the other. She was too young to grasp that Biyal’s fate awaited her as well. As if to underscore that, she said, “Feel me, Reatur. I think I’m going to bud.”

Reatur ran fingers along her body. Sure enough, the barest beginnings of bulges were there. “I think you are, too, Lamra,” he said, as gently as he could.

“Good,” Lamra said. No, Reatur thought, she did not understand the connection between buds and death that so abridged mates’ lives. Sadness pressed on him. Lamra was a mate he cared for more than he had for any in years. She was more uniquely herself than most mates ever got to be in their limited spans. He would miss her when her time came. Maybe, he thought, a minstrel would be visiting the domain then, and he could pay the fellow for a song by which to remember her.

While he was musing, Numar was getting bored and annoyed that no one was paying attention to her anymore. She poked Lamra with three arms at once, then raced off down the hail. Letting out a squawk loud enough to wake half the mates who were sleeping, Lamra dashed after her.

Reatur got Biyal out of the mates’ quarters and barred the door behind him. He was taking the corpse to the fields when he almost ran into Enoph, who was on his way back from the humans’ flying house. More questions, Reatur supposed; the humans asked more questions and poked their eyes-even without eyestalks-into more places than any people the domain master had ever known. If they had not been so spectacularly strange looking, he would have suspected them of being Skarner spies.

Enoph peered through the gloom. When he recognized what Reatur was dragging after him, he asked, “Would you like me to take care of that for you, clanfather?”

“Eh? No, thank you, Enoph. Mates get all too little in life; I try to give them what I can, and to honor them as I can after they die, as well.”

Enoph opened and closed a hand in agreement. “Yes, I think you act rightly, clanfather. I have two mates in my booth, and treat them as well as I can. For one thing, they’re more fun to be with that way than when you don’t try to train them and just leave them like animals.”

“I certainly think so,” Reatur said.

“Are the budlings well?” Enoph asked.

“The male is large, and seems sturdy. So do the five mates, come to that.” Reatur let air sigh through his breathing pores. “Time will tell.” So many budlings died young. If a male lasted five years, he might well live a long life… if. Many mate budlings never lived to receive buds themselves. And those who did, no matter how strong and healthy they were, had only Biyal’s fate to look forward to.

“How many males is it for you now?” Enoph asked.

Reatur had to count on his fingers and was not quite sure even when he had finished. “I think this puts me within three of filling my fourth eighteen,” he said at last.

“A goodly sum,” Enoph said. In the gathering darkness, Reatur could hardly see the younger male’s eyestalks. “I’ve had four myself, only one still alive. The mates budded with them have not done well, either.”

It was Reatur’s turn to open and close his hand. “Few who aren’t domain masters have the food to spare to keep many mates alive even to budding age,” he said sympathetically. “I daresay we’d run short of them if they didn’t come five to our one.”

“Something to that.” Enoph widened himself. “I’ve kept you long enough from what you came out here for, clanfather. I’ll leave you to it now.” He started back toward the castle’s outwalls.

Reatur let him go, though he had been glad enough of the interruption. Saying farewell to a mate was not a task he approached eagerly. He dragged Biyal’s corpse to a part of the field where the humans’ flying house had seared the crops. Scavengers, he knew, would make off with most of it, but the rest would decay and give fresh value to the soil.

Farther north, he had heard, were folk who, at least in summer, dug holes in the ground as resting places for their dead. That was practical there, where the ground unfroze to a depth greater than a male’s height and stayed soft half the year. In Reatur’s domain, and those around him, burial was more trouble than it was worth.

He murmured a prayer, asking the gods to grant Biyal the long life she had not been able to enjoy here. He added a brief petition for the budlings’ health, then widened himself in a last gesture of respect for their mother.

He was just returning to his full height when two of his eyes were suddenly blinded by a brilliant flash of violet light. He almost jumped out of his skin. Glaring afterimages filled those eyes even after he shut them, as if on a rare clear day he had looked straight at the sun.

Before he had the sense to tell himself not to, he had turned another eyestalk in the direction of the flash. He saw a human pointing something at him. “I might have known,” he muttered. A moment later, the flash went off again, putting that third eye out of commission. “Enough!” he shouted.

“What?” It was one of the humans with a voice that sounded like a person’s-the small one, Reatur thought, though without several humans together it was harder to be sure.

He noticed that the afterimages were fading from the first two eyes that had been flashed and opened them again. Yes, they could see. He was relieved to find he was not blind for good through a third-no, half-of his field of vision. Blind as a human, he thought, and through his annoyance knew a moment’s pity for the strange creatures.

“What is that thing?” he asked, walking toward the human and pointing at whatever he was holding. The domain master spoke slowly and repeated himself several times.

“Reatur?” The human put the question-ending on his name. “Who else?” he said. For the first time, it occurred to him to wonder whether real people looked as strange to humans as humans did to real people. He pointed again and asked again, “What is that thing?”

The human-yes, he decided, it was the male called Sarah- finally understood. “Camera,” he said in his own language, then “picture-maker” in the Omalo tongue.

“Ah,” Reatur said. He had no idea of how the humans’ picture-making gadgets worked, but he admired what they did. Some of them would spit out pictures right away, pictures as marvelously detailed and accurate as the one of the strange thing the humans had shown him just after their house fell from the sky. Reatur had an image of himself, one of Ternat, and another of his castle; the humans, to his surprise, had not even charged him for them.