"This talent . . . kills you?"

             Seranis smiled wearily. Yes. Stressed so, inevitably the brain loses structure, substance. This defect of finiteness we share with you Ur-humans.

             Cley knew that she was speaking with the person who had brought her kind back into the world, yet she could not decide whether to be angry or grateful. "Then why give it to us, if we did not have it before . .. before you cooked us up from your Library?"

             Did a quick flicker of caution pass in the tightening of Seranis's lips? For now, let me simply say that we know you well enough to savor your kinesthetic joys, your quick and zesty sense of the world. That we lost in Lys.

             Cley thought. Lost in lies?

             Seranis blinked and Cley knew she had been understood. The little joke came through in even this strange medium.

             Somberly Seranis said. We believed the great lie about invaders, yes. Some say that is why we are so named.

             "Invaders?"

             Once both Diaspar and Lys believed that humanity fled the stars, before a horde. But the fact — uncovered by Alvin as he ventured out from Diaspar, to Lys and beyond — is that humanity retreated before the knowledge of greater minds among the stars. We tried to evolve even vaster forces, minds free of matter itself. And succeeded. But exhaustion and fear drove us into a wan recessional as cities died and hopes faded.

             An immense sadness ran through these thoughts, long rolling notes that held in Cley's mind like a soulful dirge. These chords were all counterpointed by the pressing world around her—a medley of crackling distant fires, the acrid tang of oily smoke, the hoarse shouts of orders and dismay, the grim grinding of heavy machines.

             She realized Alvin was studying her with interest, and remembered that she had spoken his name. Immediately she had a sense of the chasm that had opened between her and anyone who could not catch the silky speed of this talent, its filmy warmth and cloaked meanings.

             And it brought more still—pure unbidden sensation. Seranis turned to give a spoken order to a machine and Cley felt an echo of the woman's swivel, the catch of indrawn breath, minute pressures and flexes. Still deeper in Seranis burned a slow, sexual fire. The folk of Lys had kept the roiling passions of early humanity, the carnal joy and longing that flushed the mind with goaty rut, calling up the pulsing urgencies laid down in reptile brains on muddy shores.

             Seranis was an adult in a way Alvin would never be. Neither was wrong or right; each subspecies had chosen profoundly different paths.

             "Ah, yes," Cley made herself say, jerking her mind out of the hot, cloying satisfactions of this talent. "I, I . . ."

             "You need say nothing," Alvin said, smiling. "I envy you. More, I need you."

             Ranks of tractor-driven robots roared by them, making talk impossible, slinging pebbles high in the air. Seeker nervously shuffled back and forth, eyeing the gargantuan machines. It had now the look of an animal in strange surroundings, wary and skittish. Cley was concerned for it, but she knew she could do nothing for Seeker without the approval of the Supras.

             "Need me?" she asked. "For what?"

             Alvin said smoothly, "You are a rarity now. That was why I searched."

             The lightning sought our Ur-humans, Seranis put in. Alvin himself looked for the survivors, but . . .

             Cley glanced from Alvin to Seranis, acutely conscious of their casual ease. They were half again as large as she, their chocolate skins vibrant with health. Seranis, though, showed lines in her face which gave it a grave, crinkled geometry. Their clothes rippled to accommodate each movement. An air of unconscious well-being hovered around their sleek resilience. She glanced down at herself: bruised from her injuries, scratched by bushes, skin creased and scabbed and dirty.

             She felt a flickering burst of embarrassment.

             I am sorry, Seranis sent with concern. That was an overlap of my own emotion. Nakedness carries sexual and social signals in Lys.

             Cley asked wonderingly, "The simple baring of skins?" Her people enjoyed the rub of the world on their flesh, but it meant nothing more. For her, passion rose from context, not attire.

             Alvin V kind do not feel it, since immortals do not need reproduction.

             "They do not sex?"

             Seldom. Long ago they altered themselves —a subcurrent added, (or perhaps the machines did a little pruning) with a lilting tinge of amber laughter— to avoid the ferment of sexuality. They banished sexual signaling, all the unconscious signs and gestures. Still, I have this trait, and some of my feelings transmitted to you. I —

             "Never mind," Cley said shortly. She ordinarily felt no shame at all and much preferred her present nudity. Clothes robbed her of freedom and a silky sensitivity.

             What did bother her was her sudden intense feeling of inferiority. It had come welling up, tagged with the unsettling embarrassment and riding on her knowledge that her kind was so limited. To the Supras she was a living fossil.

             She remembered with some satisfaction that Alvin was deaf to the darting talent-currents and so spoke aloud, though already the thick movements of her throat and tongue were beginning to seem brutish and clumsy. "Why are you so concerned for us?"

             "You Ur-humans are valuable," Alvin said cautiously.

             "Because we can do grunt labor?" Cley asked sarcastically.

             "You know you have crafts in dealing with biological systems that we later adaptations do not," Seranis said evenly.

             "Oh sure." Cley held up a small finger which she quickly transformed into five different tools—needle, connector, biokey, pruner, linkweb. "This wasn't your add-on?"

             "Well," Seranis said carefully, "we did modify a few of them. But Ur-humans had the underlying capabilities."

             Cley's mouth twisted with ironic humor. "Good thing you gave me this talent-talk. I can feel that there's something you don't want to tell me."

             "You are right." Alvin swept his arms to take in the wall of roiling smoke that stood like a solid, ominous barrier. "We're concerned now because we could lose you all."

             "Lose us?"

             She caught thoughts from Seranis but the layers were chopped wedges, fogged by meanings she could sense but not decipher. In the instant between lose and us she felt a long, stretched interval in which gravid blocks of meaning rushed by her. It was as if immense objects swept through a high, vaulted space that she could see only in quilted shadows. She felt then the true depth and speed of Seranis—knew that through this luxuriant talent she was floating in a tiny corner of an immense cathedral of ideas, far from the great transept and unaware of labyrinths forever shrouded. Passages yawned far away, reduced by perspective to small mouths, yet she knew instantly that they were corridors of thought down which she could never venture in her lifetime. The hollow silence of these chilly spaces, all part of Seranis, held unintelligible mystery. These people looked human, despite their size and odd liquid grace, but she suddenly sensed that they were as strange as any beast she had seen in the swelling forests. Yet they stood in the long genetic tradition of her kind and so she owed them some loyalty. Still, the sheer size of their minds—