“We found a small group of Zardalu—” He was grinding on.

“You mean, you found people from the territory of the Zardalu Communion?” Glenna Omar was smiling with delight. Darya was sure that she thought Rebka was making up the whole thing for her benefit.

“No. I mean what I said. We found Zardalu, the original land-cephalopods.”

“But they’ve been extinct for ten thousand years!”

“Most have. But we found fourteen living ones—”

“Eleven thousand years.” Merada’s high-pitched voice from the end of the table told Darya that everyone in the dining room was listening.

Bang went a lifetime’s reputation for serious and sober research work! Darya kicked again at Rebka’s leg under the table, only to be rewarded with a pained and outraged cry from Glenna Omar.

“Or rather more than eleven thousand,” Merada went on. “As nearly as I can judge, it has been eleven thousand four hundred and—”

“ — Zardalu who had been held in a stasis field since the time of the Great Rising, when the rest of the species were killed off. But the ones we met were very much alive, and nasty—”

“But this is disgraceful!” Carmina Gold had awakened from her dormouse trance and was scowling down the table at Darya. “You must know of the fearsome reputation of the Zardalu—”

“Not just the reputation.” Darya gave up the attempt to stay out of it. “I know them from personal experience. They’re worse than their reputation.”

“ — we managed to send them back to the spiral arm.” Rebka had his hand on Glenna Omar’s elbow and seemed to be ignoring the uproar rising from all parts of the long table. “And later we returned from Serenity ourselves, except for a Cecropian, Atvar H’sial, and an augmented Karelian human from the Zardalu Communion, Louis Nenda, who remained there to—”

“ — a dating based on admittedly incomplete, subjective, and unreliable reference sources,” Merada said loudly, “such as Hymenopt race memories, and the files of—”

“ — living Zardalu should certainly have been reported to the Alliance Council!” Carmina Gold was standing up. “At once. I will do it now, even if you will not.”

“We already did that!” Darya stood up, too. Everyone seemed to be saying “Zardalu!” at once, and the group sounded like a swarm of angry bees. She did not think Carmina Gold could even hear her. “What do you think that Captain Rebka was doing on Miranda before he came here?” she shouted along the table. “Sunbathing?”

“ — about four meters tall.” Rebka had his head close to Glenna Omar’s. “An adult specimen, standing erect, with a midnight-blue torso supported on thick blue tentacles—”

“ — living Zardalu—”

“My God!” Merada’s piercing tenor cut through the hubbub. His worries over the dating of Zardalu extinctions had apparently been replaced by a much more urgent one. He turned to Darya. “Wild Phages, and an Alliance councilor, and an embodied computer. Professor Lang, those entries for the fifth edition of the catalog, the ones for which you promised to provide the references. Are you telling me that the only reference sources you will offer me are—”

There was a loud crash. Carmina Gold, hurrying out of the dining room but turning to glare back at Darya, had collided with a squat robot carrying a big tureen of hot soup. Scalding liquid jetted across the room and splashed onto the back of Glenna Omar’s graceful bare neck. She screamed like a mortally wounded pig.

Darya sat down again and closed her eyes. With or without soup, it was unlikely to be one of the Institute’s most relaxing dinners.

“I thought I handled things rather well.” Hans Rebka was lying flat on the thick carpet in the living room of Darya’s private quarters. He claimed that it was softer than his bed on Teufel. “You have to understand, Darya, I said all those things about the Builders and the Zardalu on purpose.”

“I’m sure you did — after we all agreed to reveal absolutely nothing to anyone about them! You agreed to it, yourself.”

“I did. Graves proposed it, but we all agreed we should keep everything to ourselves until the formal briefing to the Council. The last thing we wanted was to throw the spiral arm into a panic because there are live Zardalu on the loose.”

“And panic is just what you started at dinner. Why did you all of a sudden do the exact opposite of what we said we’d do?”

“I told you, the briefing to the Council was an absolute fiasco. We need to get people worked up about the Zardalu now. Not one Council member would believe a word of what we had to say!”

“But Julius Graves is a Council member — he’s one of them, an insider.”

“He is, and yet he isn’t. He was elected one of them, but of course his interior mnemonic twin, Steven Graves, as someone pointed out early in the hearing, was never elected to anything. No one expected a simple memory extension device to develop self-awareness, and that happened after Julius was elected to the Council. The integration of the personalities of Julius and Steven seems to be complete now — the composite calls himself Julian, and gets upset if you forget and still call him Julius or Steven. But there were more than a few hints by other councilors that the development of Steven had sent Julius off his head while the integration was going on. You can see their point: although councilors do not lie or fabricate events, Julian Graves is not, and never was, a councilor.”

“But what about E.C. Tally? A computer, even an embodied computer, can’t lie. He should have had more to say than anyone — his original body was torn to bits by the Zardalu.”

“Try and prove that, when you don’t have one tangible scrap of evidence that all the Zardalu didn’t become extinct eleven thousand years ago, and stay extinct. A computer can’t lie, true enough — but it can sure as hell be reprogrammed with a false set of memories.”

“Why would anyone want to do that?”

“That’s not the Council’s worry. And old E.C. didn’t help his case at all. Halfway through his testimony he started to lecture the Council about the inadequacies of the Fourth Alliance central data banks, and the nonsense that had been pumped into him from those banks about the other clades of the spiral arm before he was sent to the Phemus Circle. The Council data specialist interrupted E.C. to say that was ridiculous, her data banks contained nothing but accurate data. She insisted on doing a high-level correlation between E.C.’s brain and what’s in the central banks. That’s what convinced the Council that Tally’s brain had been tampered with. His memory bank shows that Cecropians believe themselves superior to humans and all other species, and that a Lo’tfian interpreter for a Cecropian can when necessary operate quite independently of his Cecropian dominatrix. It shows that Hymenopts are intelligent too — probably more intelligent than humans. It shows that there exist sentient Builder constructs, millions of years old but able to communicate with humans. It shows that instantaneous travel is possible, even without the use of the Bose Network.”

“But that’s true — we did it, when we traveled to Serenity. It’s all true. Every one of the statements you just made is accurate!”

“Not according to your great and wonderful Alliance Council.” Rebka’s voice was bitter. “According to them, Serenity doesn’t even exist, because it’s not in their data banks. The information there is holy writ, something you just don’t argue with, and what’s not there isn’t knowledge. It’s the same problem I’ve suffered all my life: somebody a hundred or a thousand light-years from the problem thinks they can have better facts than the workers on the spot. But they can’t, and they don’t.”

“But didn’t you say all that to them?”