Despite all the well-recited flaws of Galactic civilization, Lark knew the rules protecting fallow worlds were right. Though he’d been born flouting them, it was still his duty to help see to it they were obeyed.

Contrary to his own words, he had no objection, in principle, to Ling’s bunch eliminating local witnesses, if the means were gentle. Take a gene-tailored plague, one leaving everyone healthy but sterile. That might handle their witness predicament and solve Jijo’s problem as well.

Ah, but Lark also had a duty to oppose the raiders’ gene-stealing scheme. That, too, was a violation of Jijo, not unlike rape. With the sages apparently •waffling, only the zealot conspiracy seemed willing to fight the alien threat.

Hence Lark’s impassioned lie, meant to build trust between two very different radical bands. He wanted a coalition with the zealots, for one simple reason. If there were plans afoot, Lark wanted a say in them.

Cooperate for now, he told himself as he spoke on, using his best oratorical skills to soothe their suspicions, arguing persuasively for alliance.

Cooperate, but keep your eyes open.

Who knows? There may come a way to accomplish both goals with a single stroke.

The Universe demands of us a sense of irony. For example, all the effort and good will that forged the Great Peace was worthwhile. We folk of the Commons became better, wiser because of it. We also supposed it would work in our favor, if/when Galactic inspectors came to judge us. Warring nations do more harm to a world than those who calmly discuss how best to tend a shared garden. It would surely weigh well that we were courteous and gentle criminals, not rapacious ones.

Or so we reasoned. Did we not, my rings?

Alas, no judges dropped from the sky, but thieves and liars. Suddenly, we must play deadly games of intrigue, and those skills are not what they were in days before Commons and Egg.

How much more capable we might have been, if not for peace!

We rediscovered this truth with sharp pangs today, when a panting galloper showed up with dispatches from the forge-study of Uriel the Smith. Words of warning. Dire admonitions, telling of sky-portents, urging that we brace ourselves for visitation by a starship!

Oh, tardy premonition! A caution that arrived too late by far.

Once, stone citadels nestled on bitter-cold peaks, from north of Biblos all the way down to the tropic settlements of the Vale, flashing messages via cleverly fashioned mirrors, outracing the swiftest urrish couriers or even racing birds. With their semaphore, humans and their allies mobilized speedily for battle, making up skillfully for their lack of numbers. In time, urs and hoon developed systems of their own, each clever in its way. Even we traeki formed a network of scent-spore trackers, to warn of possible danger.

None of these feats survived peace. The semaphore was abandoned, the system of signal rockets allowed to lapse. Until lately, commerce alone simply did not justify such costly media — though ironically just last year investors had begun speaking of reoccupying those frigid stone aeries, resuming the network of flashed messages.

Had they moved faster, would we have received Uriel’s warning in time?

Would receiving it have made any difference in our fate?

Ah, my rings. How vain it is to dwell on might-have-beens. Other than solipsism, it may be the most mad thing that unitary beings waste their time doing.

“Do you have something for me?”

Rann, the tall, stern-looking leader of the sky-humans, held out his hand toward her. In the late twilight, with wind rustling a nearby thicket of pale boo, it seemed to Rety that each of his calloused fingers was like her entire wrist. Moonlight brought out shadows on Rann’s craggy features and wedgelike torso. She tried not to show it, but Rety felt all too insignificant in his presence.

Are all men like this, out there among the stars?

The thought made her feel funny, like earlier, when Besh told her it was possible to smooth away her scars.

First had come bad news.

“We cannot do anything about it here in our little clinic,” the forayer woman had told her, during Rety’s brief turn at the aliens’ sick call, near their buried station.

She had been standing in line for half the morning, a horrid wait, spent shuffling between a g’Kek with a wheezy, lopsided wheel and an aged urs whose nostril dripped a ghastly gray fluid. Rety tried hard not to step in it each time the queue moved forward. When her chance finally came to be examined under bright lights and probing rays, her hopes soared, then crashed.

“This kind of dermal damage would be easy to repair back home,” Besh had said, while ushering Rety toward the tent flap. “Bio-sculpting is a high art. Experts can mold a pleasant form out of even primitive material.”

Rety wasn’t offended. Primitive material. It’s what I am, all right. Anyway, at the time she was dazed from imagining — what if Galactic wizardry could give her a face and body like Besh, or Ling?

She set her feet, refusing to budge till Besh let her speak.

“They— they say you may take some humans with you, when you go.”

Besh had looked down at her with eyes the color of golden-brown gemstones.

“Who says such things?”

“I … hear stuff. Rumors, I guess.”

“You should not believe all rumors.”

Had there been extra emphasis on the word all? Rety leaped on any excuse for hope.

“I also hear you pay good when folks bring things you want — or news you need.”

“That much is true.” Now the eyes seemed to glitter a little. From amusement? Or greed?

“And if the news is really, really valuable? What’d be the reward then?”

The star-woman smiled, a grin full of friendship and promise. “Depending on how helpful or precious the information — the sky’s the limit.”

Rety had felt a thrill. She started to reach into her belt pouch. But Besh stopped her. “Not now,” the woman said in a low voice. “It is not discreet.”

Looking left and right, Rety realized there were other patients around, and employees of the forayers — members of the Six serving as assistants in the aliens’ many enterprises. Any one could be a spy for the sages.

“Tonight,” Besh had told her in a low voice. “Rann goes walking each evening, down by the stream. Wait next to the stand of yellow boo. The one just coming into bloom. Come alone, and speak to no one you see along the way.”

Great! Rety had thought jubilantly on leaving the tent. They’re interested! It’s exactly what I was hoping for. And just in the nick o’ time.

All might have been lost if it had taken much longer to make contact. The chief human sage had decreed she must leave tomorrow, accompanying a small donkey caravan aimed up into the mountains, along with two silent men and three big women she had never met before. Nothing was said, but she knew the goal was to catch up with Dwer, and from there head back to the wilderness she came from.

No chance of that, she had thought, relishing tonight’s rendezvous. Dwer’s welcome to go play hunter in the forest. While he’s scratchin’for eats in the Gray Hills, I’ll be living high an’ mighty, up on the Dolphin’s Tail.

That was the constellation where, rumor had it, the forayers came from, although the crablike sage, Knife-Bright Insight, once tried explaining to Rety about galaxies and “transfer points” and how the route back to civilization was twisty as a mulc-spider’s vine. None of it made sense, and she figured the old qheuen was probably lying. Rety far preferred the idea of going to a star she could clearly see — which meant she would someday look back at Jijo from the beautiful Galactic city where she’d gone to live, and stick her tongue out every night at Jass and Bom and their whole stinking tribe. And Dwer and the sages, for that matter, along with everyone else on this rancy planet who was ever mean to her.