The trail led to a clearing, and in the clearing was Tweed, sitting in a chair with a nude woman standing beside him. She spotted a man, also nude, in the trees at the edge of the clearing.

Lilo had been trying not to be impressed, but it was useless. She had no idea how much money it took to maintain a pocket disneyland like this, but she knew it was a great deal.

"Sit down, Lilo," Tweed said, and a chair unfolded from the high grass. She did, putting one foot up on the seat. She searched the pockets of the robe, found a brush, and began to comb the burrs from the wet hair on her legs.

"You've already met Vaffa," Tweed said, gesturing to the standing woman. Lilo glanced at her, noted the stance and the attitude of the hands. This woman could kill her in a second, and would. She had thought there was something familiar in the eyes.

"How many of them do you keep?" she said. There was a boa constrictor, fully twenty meters long, coiled in the grass at the woman's feet. "That's a hell of a pet."

"You don't like snakes?"

"I wasn't talking about the snake."

Tweed chuckled. "Vaffa is very useful, loyal, smart as can be, and totally ruthless. Aren't you, Vaffa?"

"If you say so, sir." Her eyes never left Lilo.

"In answer to your question, there are many Vaffas. One here, the other who helped you escape a few hours ago. Others in other places." Lilo did not need to ask why Vaffa was so useful. Though the faces and bodies were entirely different in the two she had seen, the feeling was the same. This was a killer. Quite possibly a soldier, though Lilo was not expert in mental diseases.

"Tell me about the Rings," Tweed said, unexpectedly.

"It was brought out at the trial," Lilo stammered. "I thought you knew."

"I knew, but I'm not convinced you were telling the whole truth. Where is the life capsule?"

"I don't know."

"We have ways of making you talk."

"Don't give me that crap." Tweed had a habit of talking that way, like an actor reading his lines in a third-rate thriller. "It's not a question of telling you," she elaborated. "I admitted setting it up. If I knew where it was, it wouldn't be much good to me, would it?"

At that moment, Lilo could see it might do her some harm instead of good. Tweed seemed unhappy, and that was disturbing. Keeping him happy had become very important.

Five years earlier, when her research began taking her into areas where she might expect to have trouble with the law, she had decided to build the capsule. She had contacts among the Ringers, and the money to get the project going. The idea, which had looked good at the time, was that if she got caught and convicted, her work could go on without interruption. Now she was not sure her motives had been that selfless. The urge to live is a strong one, as she had just learned.

"They questioned me with drugs," she said. "I have a friend out there. When I left the capsule, she moved it. I can't lead anyone to it. I don't know where it is."

"This accomplice," he said. "Did you have any way of getting in touch with her?"

"Have you ever been out there?"

"No, there's never time." He shrugged expressively. Lilo had seen it before, on the cube. Tweed was adept at the self-effacement routine, playing the part of one who's always busy with the People's work.

"Well, the Rings are big. If you haven't been there, you can't know just how big. I might get in touch with her by radio, but we couldn't think of a way she could be protected, too. I mean, anything could be drugged out of me, and she'd have no way of knowing if she was being lured into something. It was hard enough to get her involved in this, anyway. Ringers tend to be solitary. They don't worry much about other people's problems."

"But you have a way of getting in touch with her?"

"If you mean finding her, no. I can leave a message at the Janus switchboard. She calls every twenty years, like clockwork."

He spread his hands. "Not very efficient."

"That was sort of the idea. If it was easy for me to stop this project, it would be easy for someone who knew what I knew."

Tweed got up and walked slowly a few paces away, looking at the sky. The snake stirred, and coiled around Vaffa's leg. She bent over to stroke it, never looking away from Lilo.

"What was the name of this accomplice?"

"Parameter. Parameter/Solstice."

Song of the Rings, by Clancy-Daniel-Mitre. A collection of early human-symb collaborative poetry.

Circa 240-300 O.E. Open read-rating.

Of all the things received over the Ophiuchi Hotline, none is more wonderful than the symb. In the early part of the third century, symbs were seen as the salvation of the human race. Futurists saw the day when each human would be paired with a symb partner and forever free of reliance on airlocks, hydroponic farming, and recycled water. Each human would be a tiny model of lost Earth, free to roam the solar system at will.

It's easy to see what inspired the optimism. The symmetry of the concept is overwhelming. Each human-symb pair is a closed ecology, requiring only sunlight and a small amount of solid matter to function. The vegetable symb gathers sunlight in space, using it to convert human waste and carbon dioxide into food and oxygen. At the same time it protects the fragile human from vacuum and the extremes of heat and cold. The symb's body extends into the lungs and through the alimentary canal. Each side feeds the other.

What we didn't bargain for is the mind of the symb. Since it has no brain, a symb is nothing but a lump of artificial organic matter until it comes in contact with a human. But upon permeating the nervous system of its host it is born as a thinking being. It shares the human brain. The early experimenters learned that, once in, the symb was there to stay. Since that time relatively few have opted to surrender their mental privacy in exchange for Utopia in the Rings.

But out of the disappointment we have been given a precious gift. Ring society is not human society. We live in rooms and corridors; they have all of space. We each have the right to be the mother of one child in our lifetimes; they breed like bacteria. We are islands; they are paired minds. It is a relationship that is difficult to imagine.

Somewhere in that magical junction of two dissimilar minds a tension is created. Sparks are struck, sparks of dazzling creativity. All Ringers are poets. Poetry is a normal by-product of living. To those of us without the courage to pair, who wait for the infrequent contacts of Ringers with human society, their songs are beyond price.

Parameter floated over a golden desert that no horizon could contain. She faced the sun, which was a small but very bright disc just to anti-spinward of Saturn. Saturn itself was a dark hole in space, edged by a razored crescent with the sun set in it like a precious stone.

She saw none of this. She perceived the sun as a pressure and a wind, and Saturn as a cold, deep well that pulled.

The sunrise had been delicious. She could still taste the flavors of it flowing through the wafer-thin part of her body that had opened to receive it. She was a sunflower.

Sunflower mode was a lazy, vegetable time. Parameter had Solstice, her symb, disconnect the visual centers of her brain so she could savor the simple pleasures of being a plant. Her arms were spread wide to the light and her feet were planted firmly in the fertile soil that was her symb. It was a good time.

Seen from the outside, Parameter was the center of a hundred-meter filmy parasol, slightly parabolic. She was a spider sitting in the middle of a frozen section of soap bubble, but the section was shot through with veins, like the inner surface of an eyeball. Fluids pumped through the veins, some milky, some deep red, others purplish-brown. From a point near Parameter's navel a thin stalk extended, with a fist-sized nodule at the end of it. The nodule was at the focus of the parabola and received the small percentage of sunlight that was reflected from the sunflower. It was hot there, a steamy center for Parameter to revolve around. In the nodule and in the capillaries of the sunflower, chemical reactions were going on.