Planet aureole. Emanations of lower life-forms. Mental whispers from normal humanity. The jabber of the Tanu and their torced minions. An ambiguous murmur from the other side of the world, evanescent as a remembered dream. It is real or reverberate? Imagination or reality? Track it, lose it. Hover despairingly and know that it never was. The Earth is mute.

Go out beyond the world-halo and perceive the diapason roar of the hidden sun and the thinner arpeggios of stars near and distant, tingling with their own planets and life. No meta-psychic humanity? Then call to the ancient-in-your-day Lylmik race, frail artisans of mental prodigies… but they do not yet exist. Call to the Krondaku, brothers-mental despite their fearsome bodies… but they, too, are a race still in embryo, as are the Gi, the Poltroyans, and the rude Simbiari. The living universe is uncoadunate, mind still chained to matter. The Milieu is in its childhood and Blessed Diamond Mask unborn. There is no one to answer.

Elizabeth withdrew.

Her eyes beheld her own hands, the diamond ring symbolic of her profession faintly luminous, mocking. Banal mental images lapped and splattered her. The wide-open subvocalization of the soldier Billy, brooding over the ageing but available charms of a female tavern keeper at a place called Roniah. The other guard, Seung Kyu, preoccupied with a wager he plans to make upon some contest, the outcome of which might now be modified by the participation of Stein. The captal broadcasting pain waves from a boil in his armpit that is aggravated by the bronze breastplate of his light armor. Stein seemingly asleep calmed by his gray torc. Aiken and the woman named Sukey weaving a crude but effective screen over some mental shenanigans. Creyn now deep in verbal conversation with the anthropologist, discussing the evolution of Tanu society since the opening of the time-portal.

Elizabeth wove a shield behind which she could mourn, impervious as the diamond of her future patron saint. And when it was finished she let the bitter sorrow and rage blaze up. She wept for the irony of having fled from loneliness and bereavement, only to encounter it transformed and fresh. Cocooned, wrapped in the fire of loss, she drifted. Her face was as tranquil as that of a statue in the bright light of the Pliocene stars, her mind as inaccessible as they.

“…the Ship had no way of knowing that this sun was shortly to enter into a prolonged period of instability, triggered by a nearby supernova. Within a hundred years of our arrival, only one conceptus in thirty survived until term. Of those that were born, only about half were normal. We live long, by human standards, but we faced extinction unless the disaster could somehow be ameliorated.”

“You couldn’t simply pack up and leave?”

“Our Ship was a living organism. It died heroically when it brought us to Earth, making an intergalactic leap unprecedented in the history of our race… No, we could not leave. We had to find another solution. The Ship and its Spouse had chosen Earth for us because of a basic compatibility between our plasm and that of the highest native life-form, the ramapithecines. This enabled us to dominate them with our torc technology…”

“To enslave them, you mean?”

“Why use such a pejorative term, Bryan? Did your people speak of enslaving chimpanzees or whales? The ramas are scarcely more sentient. Or would you have had us live in a Stone Age culture? We came here voluntarily in order to follow an ancient lifestyle no longer permissible on the worlds of our galaxy. But we hardly desired to subsist on roots and berries or live in caves.”

“Perish the thought. So you made the ramas your servants and went your merry way until the sun went spotty. And then your genetic engineers found a new use for the ramas, I presume.”

“Don’t equate our technology with your own, Bryan. At this late stage of our racial life we are very poor engineers, genetic, or otherwise. All we were able to do was utilize the rama females as planting beds for our fertilized ova. It increased our reproductive rate only slightly and was a lame expedient at best. You can see how the arrival of human time-travelers, genetically compatible and virtually immune to the effects of the radiation, would seem providential to us.”

“Oh, very. Still, you have to admit that the advantages are mostly one-sided.”

“Are you so certain of that? Recall what kind of misfit human beings make the decision to come to Exile. We Tanu have a great deal to offer them. Better things than they ever dreamed possible, if they possess latent metafunctions. And we really ask so little in return.”

Something came jabbing Elizabeth.

Stop that.

Jabjabjab.

Go away.

Jab. Jabjab. Come out help I’ve screwed it.

Stop small pecking childmind Aiken.

JAB!

Vexing insect swat you Aiken! Bother someone else.

JabscratchPOUND. Dammit Elizabeth she’s going to bollix up STEIN.

Slowly, Elizabeth turned in her saddle and stared at the rider next to her. Aiken’s mind nattered on as she brought into focus a woman-form in dark flowing robes. Sukey. A tense face with plump cheeks and a button nose. Indigo eyes set too closely together for beauty, glazed with panic.

Elizabeth went into her without invitation and grasped the situation in an instant, leaving Aiken and the late-arriving Creyn to watch from outside in helpless impotence. Sukey was in the grip of Stein’s enraged mind, her sanity almost overwhelmed by the mental power of the wounded man. It was plain what had happened. Sukey was a potentially strong latent redactor and her new silver torc had made the metafunction operant. Egged on by Aiken, she had tested her ability by snooping into Stein, intrigued by the apparent helplessness of the sleeping giant. The young woman had slipped in beneath the low-level neural bath generated by the gray torc, which Creyn had set up to soothe the berserker and block out residual pain from his healing injuries. Under this lid, Sukey had seen the pitiful state of Stein’s subconscious mind, the old psychic ulcerations, the newly torn rents in his self-esteem, all gurging about in a maelstrom of suppressed violence.

The tempter had whispered to Sukey, and her innate compassion had responded. She had begun a hopelessly incompetent redact operation on Stein, confident that she could help him; but the brute resident in the pain-filled Viking soul had reared up and attacked her for her meddling. Now both Sukey and Stein were caught in a fearsome conflict of psychoenergies. If the antagonism were not promptly resolved, the outcome could be total personality disjunction for Stein and imbecility for the woman.

Elizabeth sent one blazing thought to Creyn. She dove in and folded the great wings of her own redactability about the frenzied pair. The young woman mind was flung unceremoniously out, to be fielded by Creyn, who let Sukey down easily and then watched with a respect tinged by some other emotion as the mischief was undone.

Elizabeth wove restraints, stopped the psychic whirlpool, calmed the heaving pit of fury. She plucked away the jerry-built mind-alteration structure confected by Sukey, with its naive and impudent drainage channels that were too puny for true catharsis. She bore Stein’s damaged ego up with loving force while melting the edges of the wounds and pressing the torn parts back so that healing could begin. Even the older psychic abcesses swelled and burst and vented some of their poison through her. Humiliation and rejection diminished. The father-monster shrank toward pathetic humanity and the mother-lover lost some of her vesture of fantasy. Stein-Awakened looked into Elizabeth’s mirror of healing and cried out. He rested.

Elizabeth emerged.

The party of riders had come to a halt, crowding closely around Elizabeth and her mount. She shivered in the sultry evening air. Creyn took his own soft scarlet-and-white cloak and draped it about her shoulders.