As he moved, two older piols—the pair that had come with Jindigar—scampered out of the new water-filled trench leading from the river and welcomed their old friend Chinchee by racing around his feet in a mating chase.

Ignoring the animals, the litter attendants fell back, turning to deal with Terab and the colonists who were gathering– apparently ignorant of Threntisn's plan.

The Oliat, surrounded by their ephemeral Outriders–plus Krinata's Dushau Outrider substituting for Cyrus—moved as a well-drilled marching unit, gathering stares until, finally, a cheer rose from a group of humans and quickly became a general chant. "Jindigar's! Jindigar's! Jindigar's!"

Hearing that, Threntisn turned, registered astonishment, then acceptance of the Oliat as he resumed his progress.

Jindigar gathered the linkages to guide Zannesu's Reception ahead to the hive boundary. As they watched, the hive's warriors deployed in well-drilled order behind the mound that marked the hive's perimeter. They bristled with spears and throwing hatchets. The air throbbed with one convulsive shiver of horror—a tentative warning, declaring that the hive's spirit had not broken under the recent assault.

Behind the ranks of defenders a few rustlemen gathered, consulting with each other as they observed Chinchee. The Herald had led this hive to catastrophe and was no longer trusted. But there was something else.

//The rustlemen are moving too slowly,// noted Llistyien simultaneously with Jindigar.

//Inreach,// called Jindigar. //Emulator is correct. We need a microfocus on the rustlemen.// These beings were the key intelligence of the hive. Jindigar left the linkage pattern he'd already established in place and added another level of awareness focused on the rustlemen, with a time perspective several days deep into the past. Carefully protecting Krinata from the flow, he handed the second pattern over to Venlagar gingerly, dreading a fumble.

//Relax,// responded his Inreach. //I've got it.//

Jindigar turned his attention to Zannesu, who Received a clear picture of what had happened. Rustlemen, examining the corpses of the technicians, had also handled the virulent specimens they had been working on. The insidious offworld disease had promptly mutated to live in them. The rustlemen had absolutely no resistance. We've brought death to this world when we only meant to protect it from ruthless exploitation.

The warriors leveled spears at Chinchee and forced him to stop. Jindigar kept on marching, even when Threntisn halted.

He brought the Oliat to a stop just a few paces behind the Historian and sent Krinata ahead to whisper to Threntisn, "//The rustlemen have Krinata's Fever.//"

Threntisn pierced her with a glance, flicked his eyes over the Oliat, and then silently acknowledged the datum.

Chinchee danced up to the barrier where a section was a bit lower than the rest—the erstwhile doorway—and deposited his hivebinder on the beaten-down soil. The hive sent one of its own hivebinders forward. The little carapaced beings walked on two limbs toward one another, waving their clumsy hands at each other.

//Listen!// prompted Zannesu suddenly, and brought them a lilting melody, a whisper on some other plane of awareness.

Jindigar seized the linkages and chased that elusive signal, bringing the Formulator and Emulator to bear on the meaning of it. //A mindtune—another way they have of communicating,// identified Trinarvil. //Not hostile.//

//It's not information,// volunteered Darllanyu.

//Content is emotional,// reported Llistyien. She brought it through, flooding them with the hive's inarticulate apprehension, sharp skepticism, and feelings of betrayal, desperation, despair, and a rabid determination to fight to the last life for this final resting place.

Krinata, who had remained forward, just behind Threntisn,

glanced at Cyrus as he stirred deliriously. //Center, may an.

Outreach make a suggestion?//"

//For communicating—certainly.//

Ill once overheard you playing the whule in mourning for Lelwatha—his last composition. Do you think the hive would understand that?//

Jindigar studied the hive. Llistyien, who had captured a fair semblance of an all-hive Emulation, rendered her verdict. //They have a sense for tonality that doesn't seem very alien– for ephemerals.//

//There doesn't seem to be any way to make them understand that we can cure the disease if we can get inside the ship,// mused Jindigar. //So we'll try this. Krinata, get Chinchee's attention and see if he'll let you pick up his hivebinder– but be careful. Their sting is lethal to humans.//

Ill know.// She advanced to where the Herald squatted, watching his hivebinder.

//Try to relax your throat, Krinata, or this may hurt,// Jindigar warned, then piped softly in Cassrian, explaining what they wanted but not why.

Chinchee turned as Krinata spoke, his huge saucer eyes wide in his stark white face, his ears standing straight up on top of his skull, giving him an attentive look. Seeing that his hivebinder was not making much progress, Chinchee plucked him from the humped dirt barrier and deposited him in Krinata's arms.

Krinata stroked the sleek shell of the hivebinder. She'd handled him before, but few of those memories were pleasant. Jindigar felt the small creature reaching toward Krinata, throbbing with loneliness and despair. Even though Krinata held him, the tiny being was lost in the mindsong of his fellows, a lament for their brothers in fullsong.

The Oliat automatically began to pursue that odd concept, but Jindigar restrained them. He settled them onto the ground behind Krinata, sitting cross-legged, as if to play the whule. He fetched the tangible memory of his whule, its satiny urwood finish, the long fretboard that lay just so, the perfect balance, the bow that fit his hand as if made for him. He had to vanquish the feel of it smacking into his arms and smashing into Dar's face.

Then, quite deliberately, he pulled Darllanyu into the memory. She, too, had exulted in that treasured antique whule, its tone, its obedient response to the musician's every whim. She Formulated it for the Oliat, and Llistyien Emulated the playing, holding the whole-hive Emulation as well.

Jindigar expanded the deep contact with the rustlemen to include the other three species of the hive, seeing that they were not yet affected by the plague. But they were so exhausted and despondent that general vitality had reached a critical ebb. This hive had been set into its spring reproductive cycle before they were flooded out. Now those pressures forced them to stay and fight a hopeless battle with their new neighbors, with no time to grieve their dead.

He brought that knowledge into the music welling up from his memory, just the way Lelwatha had taught him, and he channeled that music out through Krinata just as he would speech but high up in that band where the mindtunes wafted to and fro, lamenting the inevitabilities of life and death.

At first the Oliat's music clashed with the Natives' silent , song. But then Krinata became lost in her own memory—that first time she'd heard Jindigar play.

Every bow stroke evoked in her an echo of the pain he'd felt at the loss of so many zunre, at the loss of Kamminth's Oliat, of Lelwatha, Kamminth's Emulator. With every delicately plucked string, with every strummed chord, Krinata recreated every response Jindigar had put into the piece, that one time he'd played it in farewell to Lelwatha.

Jindigar's losses, Krinata's losses, the Oliat's loss of hope for survival, the colony's bleak acceptance of wholesale death blended and became one with the hivebinders' lament. Obliquely Jindigar chided himself for never suspecting how well Krinata read his music that day. He had unknowingly turned himself out naked before her. Now they must do the same before four alien species that might not understand.