Jindigar arranged himself in the recliner and took the hand contacts again. Relaxing, he ran through the drills to summon within his bodyfield the keys he had been given. Simultaneously he reran the two-minute recording planting associative search markers a\l through it. The Archivist had to do the rest.

He waited as images overlaid each other on the optical display, and emotional contexts played through him at random. Presently sequences began to surface that made sense. Jindigar drank most of it into his memory for later use but sifted topic after topic for anything relevant to Dissolving. But there was nothing on the dual-Centered Oliat.

There has to be something! He had one more key he knew but had never been authorized to use because he had not yet Centered and Dissolved. It would be dangerous for him, but ... resolutely he invoked the Observer's key.

With the suddenness of a flash flood data poured into his consciousness, scorching nerves, streaking dizzily by. It felt like driving into an obstruction at full speed and being catapulted through the air spinning end for end.

He grabbed at an image of a convocation of Oliats, and suddenly he was in an Active Temple on Dushaun. The rosy glow of the worldcircle turned the white garments of the five Oliats assembled there to light pink and somehow made visible the linkages that bound four of the Oliats into a single unit, a meta-Oliat. The fifth Oliat had two Centers, two whole sets of linkages lacing them together. the shaleiliu hum was so intense, it made Jindigar curl in on himself, tensing against it as if it threatened to dissolve him. It was coming from the four-fold Oliat and was focused on the fifth Oliat assembled on the worldcircle itself. I've found it!

The soundless vibration turned his muscles to jelly, melted his bones, invaded his mind. He fought to remain with the scene, drinking in all the data recorded in the peripherals. But in the end, before he'd grasped much of the technical background, his will collapsed.

In that moment his bodyfield lost the key he'd used to access the Observer's level, and he found himself on the recliner once more, facing an ashen-gray display that pulsed sickly.

"He's not breathing!" exclaimed a technician.

"Neither is Threntisn!"

Teams converged on them, grabbing away the contacts, stretching them out, forcing air into them. Jindigar had no strength to resist. Everything went out of him with the knowledge that the only help for them was utterly beyond their reach. A four-way meta-Oliat could be formed only of the most experienced officers and had to be Constituted by a commission of Complete Priests who could manage to link the Centers. Serving in a meta-Oliat was a legendary privilege, for the range of perception was not just a planet or a Solar System but the entire cosmos. It was the shortest, but the most dangerous, path to Completion, for very little was known about the mechanism. Not many experiments had been done, for theorists were leery of the effects of the linkage between Observer and Observed.

One datum had stuck in his mind, though. Of the four times a meta-Oliat had been Constituted to Dissolve a dual-Centered Oliat, it had succeeded only once. And nobody knew why. At least, that was where the data in this Archive left off. There has to be something else. There has to be.

"There's something else," Jindigar was still insisting raggedly as Venlagar and Zannesu carried him back to their quarters. Jindigar, driven, had wanted to go on, but Threntisn's attendants had called a halt.

Slumped on his cot, Jindigar looked around at his officers. As bad as the last couple of days had been for him, they had been many times worse for his officers—waiting, feeling the creeping inner pressure that wouldn't slack off, and with nothing to do but depend on him to find the answer. He couldn't even tell them what he'd found. He wasn't authorized to know it himself. And it did none of them any good.

They had no choice but to try the Dissolution and let it go as it would. But he knew how it would go. The moment his links blurred, Krinata would take over. Krinata wasn't Takora–even if maybe she had been once. She couldn't do a Center's job. She had lost her grip on his Oliat because she couldn't cope with the ever-shifting energy patterns and information flow. Even if she knew how, her human body wasn't conditioned to it.

One more fumble and we're all dead. What am I going to do?

He stared at them. Zannesu was stirring something in a pot hung over the fire, Eithlarin writing in her diary, Venlagar napping—probably dreaming of his wedding day if the way his throat was working meant anything. The gathering Renewal tides were affecting even Venlagar, his steadiest officer.

When Jindigar had come in, Darllanyu and Llistyien had been teaching Krinata a tune on Jindigar's whule. They had stopped, but Krinata was still seated cross-legged on the table, the whule cradled in her lap, Llistyien seated in the chair before her. Watching Jindigar, Krinata passively let Llistyien try to wrap her four fingers and barely opposable thumb around the fretboard to cover a chord that would strain a Dushau's grip.

Jindigar was about to suggest that they transpose the key when voices erupted outside. One female Dushau voice rose above the others in clear Standard.

"You can't go in there'! That's a consecrated Temple, don't you understand! You shouldn't even be–"

Jindigar leapt to his feet, as everyone else started to move. He thought he heard the rumble of a human or Lehiroh man's voice, not a sound he'd ever heard inside the compound. Krinata was the only ephemeral allowed this far.

"I can't do that," answered the Dushau as Jindigar crossed the Temple floor and approached the front door, realizing it was Trinarvil defending them. "The Oliat must not be disturbed—"

He identified Storm's voice this time. "Jindigar will be furious with you if you don't let me speak to his Oliat. You don't know what's just happened—"

Jindigar wound through the curved entryway and emerged onto the porch of the Aliom Temple beside Trinarvil, the Oliat hanging back in the shadows behind him, Krinata at his heels.

"What has happened?" asked Jindigar, ignoring his fatigued numbness.

Storm answered from the ground in front of the porch where he stood surrounded by six nervous Dushau who had closed in to escort him back out to the gate. "The Gifters laid eggs in the Cassrians' hatching pond, and their grubs ate Cassrian eggs, leaving a rotten mess that killed the other eggs. The committees had the lab create a fungus that kills the Gifters' eggs but not Cassrian eggs or hatchlings. It was supposed to stay in the pond; only tonight, they found a mutated version of that fungus growing on the corn sprouts. It killed corn even faster than it killed Gifter eggs. Jindigar, without the corn Lehiroh and humans won't survive next winter. We're too low on vitamin supplements."

And where will their fungus spread next? Scanning the group of Dushau gathering around them, Jindigar asked Trinarvil, "You knew this?"

"Yes, but Jindigar's can't cope with it."

Krinata, a trained ecologist, muttered, "I'll bet it was, a native phage that invaded the fungus and turned it."

Jindigar glanced around, agreeing with a gesture. Darllanyu, hidden back in the shadows of the tunnel entry, asked, "Are ' we going to have to work this?"

Zannesu reassured her. "We—can't"

She shook that off. "If we must—we must." Every one of them, despite the tight adjournment, knew that she held the vial of pensone in her hand like a talisman. "We can't abandon the colony at such a moment."

Eithlarin possessively edged closer to Zannesu but did not contradict Dar.

At Trinarvil's behest two Dushau Outriders moved to escort Storm toward the outer gate. In a sudden decision, driven perhaps by the long hours of tedious, fruitless effort of the last few days, Jindigar called out, "We'd like him to wait in the debriefing room. We must discuss this."