"That we can't escape responsibility for," admitted Jindigar. Except for the soldiers, everyone here had been rescued from the Imperial edict condemning all Dushau sympathizers to death.

"Tomorrow, when the news about the corn blight hits, someone is sure to say it was Dushau sabotage."

"That's ridiculous!" snorted Storm, forgetting himself for the moment. "They stand to lose as much as we do."

"Insanity," said Terab heavily, "attributes insane moves to others. Jindigar, we need an answer to this mess—and an explanation of why it happened. It doesn't have to be the real reason—it just has to be plausible enough for people who don't understand ecology to believe."

The people here had not been prepared to become colonists. They hadn't the basic education. Now that the shock of displacement and the daily terror of running for their lives was over, all they wanted was a return to their comfortable, safe existence. Jindigar was in total sympathy.

"The explanation is simple," said Krinata. "We—"

"Krinata," interrupted Jindigar, not wanting to discuss their dual-Center problem with someone who could only interpret it as a power struggle.

But she rushed on. "Terab, we misjudged the Gifters for the same reason we have no business trying to balance at all. Too many of us just aren't well enough to do this work." She tossed a defiant glance at Jindigar, as if to say he should be ashamed for doubting her discretion.

But Jindigar was just as unhappy to cite physical illness as an excuse for the inexcusable. Many another Oliat had performed at and beyond the brink of death. Besides, none of them were really ill. Yet he would not contradict his Outreach. "The fact remains, we did bring the Gifters, and they have killed Cassrian eggs." He recalled the moment when they had grasped the solution to the Holot's problem, and that had somehow communicated to the Gifters' hive-mind. Krinata's grip on the Oliat failed before they could deep-check that decision. That was no excuse. He had sent word not to molest the Gifters bringing baby food for the Holot. He was Center. He was responsible. He sighed. "It is reasonable to expect the Oliat to rectify the mess we've made."

"Terab, if we have to convene again," said Krinata, "the Dushau too near Renewal will have to take a drug—which may impair fertility—or worse. If they'd used it before, maybe we wouldn't have fumbled that reading of the Gifters, but they didn't because the damn drag can destroy them."

Terab swore a spaceman's oath. Staring, she muttered, "I didn't know a drug could delay Renewal."

"Side effects make it useful only in a life-or-death situation," Jindigar volunteered. "This seems to be one."

"Jindigar," said Terab seriously. "Don't let them do it. We'll cope with this somehow."

"How?" challenged Jindigar flatly.

"I don't know, but if people knew—"

"Would they believe?" asked Jindigar.

"The problem," said Krinata, "is that people don't take Renewal seriously. They think the Dushau just take a long vacation and expect the rest of us to support them while they indulge their whims. It isn't like that, Terab. Almost half the Dushau are deathly ill right now, and even so, they are working double-shift days, driving themselves mercilessly."

Solemnly Terab commented, "You're the only one who's ever seen any evidence of that. All we see are the fine products that come out of the Compound, the Dushau who come to teach us crafts we've never heard of, or the Oliat silently performing miracles behind the wall of Outrider guards." She fixed Jindigar with a stare. "If this colony is going to work, I think those walls have to become permeable—people have to see that you're putting as much into this as we are, that you take equal risks. Then maybe I can get them to pull together and solve this blight problem."

Jindigar couldn't imagine what more they'd care to see than they'd seen in the cave—an Oliat collapsing in the middle of a task. That wasn't a rare enough sight for them? Of course, it seemed to them that the Oliat had survived. "Do they have to see someone die, Terab?"

"Don't go getting ideas! I'll not be having any sacrifices around here!"

But what else could reconvening his Oliat be but a sacrifice?

Someone would die this time, and when it happened, perhaps he, unlike Takora, would be quick enough to cut the links and free his officers to their own fates.

There was surely no other answer to be had. He had plumbed the depths of the Archive tracing and found nothing. He couldn't just sit and review the same two minutes of history over and over while the colony starved—and worse, loosed into this innocent world a microlife construct unsuited to the world, perhaps uncontrollable within this ecology—perhaps creating another disaster such as Eithlarin had witnessed on Vistral.

He took a deep breath and let it out, then said, "I'll need the lab specs on that fungus, then we'll want to view the Cassrian hatching pond–and does anyone have specimens of that blighted corn?" He swung around to meet the gazes of Llistyien and Venlagar. They knew, as well as he did, that they had no choice.

While word of the new crisis spread through the Dushau community and delegates went out to confer with ephemerals, Jindigar and Krinata spent the evening studying the lab work on the pond infestation and the fungus. Even without a Sentient computer the ephemerals had taken only a few hours after discovering the pond invaders to mutate and produce the fungus from a stock fungus used for pest control purposes on many Cassrian worlds. It should have been safe. But something had gone wrong.

Phanphihy just doesn't want us here?

When Jindigar found his thoughts drifting in such a perilous direction—as if the Phanphihy delusion were taking hold of him as it had the Imperial troopers—he laid the study aside and went to talk to Trinarvil. He found her in her office with Zannesu and Eithlarin, discussing the side effects of pensone.

As Jindigar entered, Trinarvil broke off and looked up. "You're determined to take them into the field again?"

Jindigar replied by reciting his findings. "We must consider our options very carefully," he said. He spoke directly to Zannesu, who had prudently taken a seat as far from Eithlarin as he could. Both of them now had inflamed fingertips, just as Jindigar did. He put his hands behind his back. "I won't demand this of anyone."

"One dissent and we don't go?" asked Zannesu.

"That's right," answered Jindigar.

Trinarvil closed the folders before her. "Blood chemistries show that pensone will increase Eithlarin's break-in phobia. She's unstable, Jindigar, and Zannesu is such a close shaleiliu with her that he resonates to it."

"But Zannesu also stabilizes her," Jindigar pointed out. "We must rest before deciding. Trinarvil, could you run blood chemistries on all of us tonight?"

She pushed to her feet and leaned over the desk. "Certainly, but I can tell you the results right now. Inconclusive."

He knew she was right but didn't know what else to do. The next morning, they discussed it all again and voted unanimously to work. Jindigar sent word to Threntisn that he wouldn't be searching the Archive and took his Oliat into the Temple where he presented them with Trinarvil's estimates of their individual need for pensone according to then– blood hormone levels—notoriously unreliable in early onset because the glands produced surges of hormone at irregular intervals. It was just such a surge that had conquered Darllanyu in the Holot cave.

Darllanyu looked at the slip with her results on it, then folded it. "I told you before. I won't go into the field without pensone. I almost killed us all last time."