In alphabetical order, to my granddaughters Andrea Josephsohn and Kimberley Ladd; my daughter,

Kristen; my grandson Matthew Josephsohn; my son, Philip Laird; my granddaughter Stephanie

Josephsohn; my grandson Torin Paul Farmer. And to any descendants of my wife, Bette Virginia Andre, and of myself fifteen billion years from now, when this story takes place.

BLACK was the sun; bright, the sky.

Under the arc packed with dead and living stars, dark or blazing gas clouds and galaxies, on an Earth in which lay the bones or over which blew the dust of seven hundred fifty-four million or so generations,

Deyv walked toward his destiny.

"Look for a mate and find a dragon" was a proverb of the tribe.

If you were a pessimist, it sounded ominous. If you were an optimist, it sounded rewarding. There were good dragons and there were evil. Or so Deyv understood. He'd never seen one.

Like most people, Deyv's attitude depended upon the circumstances. At the moment, he was scared and so pessimistic.

Deyv of the Red Egg walked away from the Turtle Tribe of the Upside-Down House. Towering behind him was the House, a cylinder three hundred feet in diameter, made of indestructible metal. Its red, green, and white checked walls slanted slightly so that the round base, ten stories above the ground, afforded an unimpeded view of the earth directly below. The conical tip was buried ten stories deep.

Once, according to what the old women said, the House had been entirely under the ground. But erosion and numerous earthquakes had pushed it up ten generations ago.

To Deyv's left, in the center of the clearing, stood the soul-egg tree. Its gnarly trunk was bare of branches for twenty feet, and then the branches began that formed a cone standing on its apex. The bark gleamed red, white, green, blue, and purple, so heavily impregnated with quartz that it was hard as rock.

From the branches dangled the fruit, the soul eggs, each as big as Deyv's fist. Around the tree was a circle of dry, pale dirt a hundred feet in diameter, and outside the circle marched four bowmen. Up in the tower, near the base of the tree, were four watchers, each ready to beat on a drum if an enemy human or a predator beast was sighted.

Behind Deyv came the rest of the tribe—men, women, children, dogs, and cats. All the people were shouting the ritual encouragement, except for the appointed insulter.

"Yaaa, Deyv of the Red Egg! See how he has to be driven forth into the jungle! Does he go bravely like our heroic foreparents or like his own great-souled father? Naaah! He goes trembling, legs shaking, his bowels ready to loose themselves with fear, and that red egg .. . ! Ha! That red egg! It betrays the color of his soul! It's green, green with fear! Rabbit! Mouse! March like a man, like a warrior of the Turtles.

Don't slink like a coyote!"

Gurni, the insulter, was having fun. He was also getting revenge for what Deyv had once cried at him when he had gone out to get a mate.

Deyv looked down at the soul egg hanging from a leather cord around his neck. His face felt warm, and he could see his body, except where the breechclout covered it, turning red. It was true. The translucent stone, a pale scarlet when he was in a good mood, had become streaked with green. The green pulsed swiftly as if it were connected with his hammering heart. Which, in a sense, it was.

How humiliating! How embarrassing!

"Don't pay any attention to that big-mouthed'blow-wind!" his mother shouted almost in his ear. "No man or woman has ever gone out on a mate-hunt without showing some green. Except the hero Keelrow, and that was five generations ago, and maybe if s all a lie about him, anyway!"

The shaman, Agorw, danced up alongside Deyv. He wore a bonnet of tall feathers; the cheeks of his face and buttocks were marked with three vertical stripes, red, white, and blue; his breechclout was painted with the crooked cross; his knees were bound in leather, from which dangled seven coils of human hair; one hand was inserted inside a skull of a giant turtle and the other shook a staff from which hung three empty turtle shells. His own soul egg was a deep blue shot with pulsating aquamarine streaks.

"Shame on you, woman!" he cried. "The ghost of Keelrow will come to you in your dreams and put horns on your husband's head. And the child will drink you dry!"

"See these!" Deyv's mother yelled. "Do you think any baby, even if he were as big and fat as you, could empty these?"

The tribe howled with merriment, and the shaman, his face red, stomped off out of Deyv's sight.

For a moment, Deyv forgot his fear and embarrassment. He chuckled. His mother was afraid of nothing.

He wished he were. But she was like him in that she had a quick temper and sometimes had to pay for it

The shaman would get back at her somehow. However, she would not regret her words. She was willing to take the consequences. Especially in this situation, where her pride in her baby overrode anything else.

Deyv, her baby, was six feet two inches high, the tallest of the tribe. His shoulders were broad, but he had the long legs and wiry build of a long-distance runner. His skin was a dark copper; his hair, black as a fly and as wavy as a wind-rippled brook. The forehead was high and wide; the brows, beetling; the nose, a hawk's; the lips, thick; the chin, round and clefted. By his features alone, any of the other people for sixty miles around would have known he was a Turtle.

He wore a shell of the checkered turtle on his head, a scarlet breechclout, and calf-high leather boots. A

leather belt held a leather scabbard containing a slim sword with two cutting edges. Also held by the belt was a stone tomahawk. Over one shoulder was a case holding a blowgun, a compression cylinder, and in its pocket, twelve darts, the tips of which were coated with poison. A coiled rope was slung over the other shoulder.

This was what every well-dressed man or woman wore when seeking a mate.

After entering the jungle, Deyv stepped behind a delta-shaped feathery bush and parted its fronds. The tribe had turned away except for his mother and father and his dog, Jum. About twenty yards behind them, lying down spninxlike, was his cat, Aejip.

Deyv waited until his parents had at last walked back toward the House. Then he whistled, and Jum, who'd been waiting for this signal, bounded up to him. He was a large wolflike beast with big pointed upstanding ears, a crimson coat, a tail edged in black, and slanting green eyes. He licked Deyv's calf until he was told to quit, and then he sat down, his tongue hanging out. His forehead was as high as a chimpanzee's and so was his intelligence.

Aejip was taking her time with all the nonchalance of any cat that had ever lived. When she stood, she was two and a half feet high at the shoulder. Her glossy coat was tawny and rosetted in black. Above the great yellow eyes were two vertical bkAck markings. Her forehead was as developed as Jum's.

Deyv thought of whistling for her, but the cat had made it evident that she wasn't going to accompany her partner—no cat acknowledged a master—on his journey. Though she couldn't talk, she had put across the idea that she considered Deyv to be out of his mind. Besides, she was jealous because Deyv had been paying so much attention to Jum these past two weeks.

So Deyv shrugged and turned, with Jum a few feet ahead of him, and proceeded down the jungle path.

Every step that took him away from the tribe was a pace deeper into loneliness and insecurity. If he'd been accompanied by anyone on a hunt for food, one which he knew would see him back with the tribe after a sleep or even seven sleeps, he would have been happy. But to go forth by himself for only The