Back? At first, she could not bring herself to understand. She puzzled while he gabbled on and on.

Back?

Back to Jass and Bom and their strutting ways? To the endless bullying of those big, strong hunters? Always boasting around the campfire about petty, vicious triumphs that grew more exaggerated with each telling? To those wicked oafs who used fire-tipped sticks to punish anyone who dared to talk back to them?

Back to where mothers watched half their babies waste away and die? To where that hardly mattered, because new babies kept on coming, coming and coming, till you dried up and died of old age before you were forty? Back to all that hunger and dirt?

The human sage had muttered words and phrases that were supposed to sound soothing and noble and logical. But Rety had stopped listening.

They meant to send her back to the tribe!

Oh, it might be fine to see Jass’s face when she strode into camp, clothed and equipped with all the wonders the Six could offer. But then where would she be? Condemned once more to that awful life.

I won’t go back. I won’t!

With that resolution, Rety rolled over, wiped her eyes, and considered what to do.

She could try running away, taking shelter elsewhere. Rumors told that all was not in perfect harmony among the Six. So far, she had obeyed Cambel’s request not to blab the story of her origins. But Rety wondered — might some urrish or qheuen faction pay for the information? Or invite her to live among them?

It’s said the urs sometimes let a chosen human ride upon their backs, when the human’s light enough, and worthy.

Rety tried to picture life among the galloping clans, roaming bold and free across the open plains with wind blowing through her hair.

Or what about going to sea with hoons? There were islands nobody had ever set foot on, and flying fish, and floating mountains made of ice. What an adventure that would be! Then there were the traeki of the swamps…

A new thought abruptly occurred to her. Another option that suddenly appeared to lie open. One so amazing to contemplate that she just lay there silently for several duras, hands unclenching at last from their tightly clutched fists. Finally, she sat up, pondering with growing excitement a possibility beyond any other ambition she had ever conceived.

The more she thought about it, the better it began to seem.

The others are asleep now. It’s late, but I want to get all this down, ’cause things are about to get busy and I don’t know when I’ll have another chance.

Tomorrow we head back down the mountain, loaded with all kinds of gear lent to us by Uriel the Smith-so much good stuff that we’re feeling pretty dumb right now about our former plans.

To think, we were willing to trust our lives to some of the junk we designed!

Uriel already sent messages to our parents, calligraphed on heavy cloth paper and sealed with her signet as a sage of the Commons. So there’s not much Huck’s folks or mine can do to stop us.

Kot that I looked forward to facing them, anyway. What would I say? “Hey, Pop. It’ll be just like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea! Remember how often you read it to me, when I was little?”

I recall now how that tale ended for Captain Nemo’s submarine crew, and I can see why Yowg-wayuo regrets what a humicker I’ve become. If my father confronts me over this, I’ll discuss it in a language other than Anglic, to show that I really have thought it out several ways. This trip is more than a passing kid-obsession but something meaningful for our village and our race. Me and the others are going to make history. It’s important for a hoon to be involved, from notion to motion to recollection.

Once she decided, Uriel really got things rolling. Pincer-Tip headed out the very same evening after Ziz was vlenned, taking the newly budded traeki to his home hive for water-adapting in the tidepools south of Wuphon. Pincer will also use the smith’s authority to hire some red-shelled cousins to haul the bathy’s wooden hull to a meeting point down near the Rift. The rest of us will come overland with supply wagons.

Test dives start in just five days!

The choice of a site was vital. There’s just one place where the Midden’s deep watery trench plunges like a scythe blade toward the coast. Where it sends a deep rupture of jagged canyons passing right next to Terminus Rock. By deploying a boom from an overhanging ledge, we won’t even need to hire a ship.

It’s a relief to have a decision made at last. Even Huck admits the die is cast, accepting destiny with a shrugged rubbing of two eyestalks.

“At least we’ll be right there at the border, where I want to be anyway. When we finish, Uriel will owe us. She’ll have to write us a warrant to go over the line and visit some Buyur ruins.”

There’s an Anglic word — tenacity — that comes out as stubbornness when I translate into GalSix. Which is one more reason why human speech best describes my pal Huck.

All of us, even Ur-ronn, are more than a little surprised by how Uriel is throwing resources at our “little adventure” all of a sudden. We talked about the smith’s outbreak of helpfulness during our last evening on Mount Guenn, after a long day spent packing crates and going over inventory lists, waiting for the factory complex to settle down for the night.

“It nust have to do with the starshifs,” Ur-ronn said, lifting her muzzle from the straw of her sleeping pallet.

Huck turned two stalks toward Ur-ronn — leaving just one buried in her well-thumbed copy of Lord Valentine’s Castle. She groaned. “Not that again! What in the world could our dumbass little diving trip have to do with Galactic cruisers coming to Jijo? Don’t you think Uriel would have more important things on her mind?”

“Vut Gyfz said, a week ago—”

“Why not just admit you overheard Gybz wrong? We asked er again today, and that traeki doesn’t recall seeing any spaceships.”

“Not that traeki,” I corrected. “We never had a chance to ask Gybz anything, before the vlenning. It’s Tyug who said er doesn’t remember.”

“Tyug, Gybz. The difference can’t be that great. Not even a vlenned traeki would forget something like that!”

I wasn’t so sure about that. Traeki memory wax can be tricky stuff, I hear.