The ends of the neural cable had been placed close to hand. Julius Graves picked up the male connector. After a few seconds of effort he inserted it snugly into position at the upper end of the body’s hindbrain.

“Half the job done.” He was breathing loudly through his mouth. “But the other one doesn’t want to go in. Hold him still.” Graves’s fingers were slippery with cerebrospinal fluid. He could not force home the connector attaching the computer brain to the neural cable.

“Hold on a minute.” Birdie Kelly wiped his hands down his pants, then reached across to take both the brain and the connector from Graves. He pressed the plug home hard onto the multiple prongs of the computer’s receptor.

“Gently!” Graves said. But the body of E. C. Tally was already sitting up and lifting free of J’merlia’s grip.

“Hmm — kkh — khmmm.” The torso shivered, and the eyes snapped open.

Graves bent close. “E. C. Tally! Can you hear me?”

“Very well.” The topless head turned. “Excuse me, Councilor, but there is no need to shout like that. This body is equipped with excellent sensory apparatus.”

The skull was still gaping wide, the empty cranium inverted and hanging upside down in front of Tally’s bright blue eyes. Birdie Kelly stared at that empty skull, split open like a coconut, and at the neural cable that ran from the base of the brain to the little sphere in his right hand. His torso wanted to shiver, too. Life on Opal was tough, but it had not prepared him for this sort of thing.

As Birdie watched, Tally reached up, took the open skull case in both hands, and casually rotated it back into position. “It won’t quite close, I’m afraid,” he said, “because the neural connector inhibits the seal. If possible we should tie it in place. It would be inconvenient to have the upper cranium detached and lost.”

He turned to glance at the sphere that Birdie was holding. “Handle me with care if you please, Commissioner Kelly. What you have in your hands represents a substantial investment of Fourth Alliance property. I’m afraid that the body has already suffered minor damage, since it was not anticipated that we would need to perform brain removal in an unprepared facility.” A thin trickle of blood was running down the left side of Tally’s forehead. He wiped it away casually, stared around the chamber, and continued. “Also, my motor and sensory performance is somewhat impaired. The signal-carrying capacity of the neural cable is less than that of the original connection. I am able to see with rather less definition, colors are muted, and I sense that my muscular control is diminished. However, it should certainly be adequate for our purposes.”

He rose to his feet, staggering a little before he caught his balance. At his direction J’merlia and Graves tied a makeshift bandage around his head, adding an extra wrapping to hold both the upper cranium and the external neural cable in position. Birdie Kelly was still holding the brain in nervous hands, doing his best to avoid jiggling it or putting any pressure on it.

“Are you sure you are ready?” Graves asked. “Don’t you want to practice moving?”

But Tally was already stepping forward. “That would be pointless,” he said. “My coordination would not improve. But as one precaution, let me do this.” He picked up the strong line that he had used on his previous foray toward the center of the room and tied it around his waist. “You can always haul me back here. So now, if J’merlia will pay out the neural cable, Commissioner Kelly, as necessary…”

Tally took two staggering steps forward and began to weave his way down the gentle slope that led to the center of the chamber. He was soon into the first of the concentric rings. At the far edge of the yellow annulus he paused for a moment, while the others froze. Then he was off again, heading for the silent figure of Kallik. Birdie Kelly watched him, afraid even to blink, as J’merlia paid out cable from the reel that he was holding, at a pace just enough to prevent the line from tightening or drooping to touch the floor. There was something wholly unnatural about that human form, head bloody and bandaged, moving into the shallow and brightly lit cauldron of gaudy colors. He staggered as he walked, and the two cables trailing behind him swayed and jerked with a life and rhythm of their own.

“Come out at once if you feel you are losing memories,” Graves called.

Tally waved an arm without slowing his progress. “Certainly. Though I do not expect that to happen. How can it, when I am with you in the hands of Commissioner Kelly?”

He was already past the green ring and moving on to the purple one. Two seconds more, and he was sinking slowly to sit on the floor beside Kallik, careful to keep his head upright. His fingers touched the Hymenopt’s furry thorax. “She is alive. Unconscious, but not apparently injured. I cannot lift the line around her from the floor, but if I release her from it I see no difficulty in carrying her out.”

Tally stood up and peered toward the center of the chamber. “But first, I think it is better if I proceed all the way in, and examine the situation there. I can retrieve Kallik as I return.”

Not what I’d do, Birdie thought. A bird in the hand… He glanced at the sphere of the now-disembodied computer. It was strange that the only way to pass messages to the real E. C. Tally was to call them to the brainless body moving slowly toward the middle of the room, and have the sensory input fed back through the cable to the brain that Birdie was holding.

Tally was moving more slowly. The low central platform was only fifteen meters away, but he took twenty cautious seconds to reach it. Two steps from the silent figure of Louis Nenda he paused.

“There is something peculiar about the dais itself. As I have approached it, an interior structure has gradually become visible. It is a set of dodecahedra, invisible from fifteen meters. At ten I saw a hazy outline, like gray smoke. Now the pattern is apparently solid. Tendrils run from two of the dodecahedral faces and surround the heads of Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial. That must be why the bodies can remain seated upright, although both are unconscious.”

Birdie glanced at Graves, then peered toward the platform. From where he stood it looked empty except for the outward-facing seats, the Cecropian, and the human.

“I propose to try to remove Nenda from the platform first,” Tally said. “I have no idea if there will be resistance, active or passive.”

He took the final two steps, reached up, and grasped Louis Nenda by the shoulders. He began to lift. To the watchers it appeared that the two bodies moved to an unstable position, leaning back far from the vertical.

“There is definite resistance,” Tally said. “But also there is progress. We are a few centimeters farther from the platform, and the connecting tendril has thinned. It is starting to turn in on itself, like a ring of blown smoke—” He lurched backward suddenly, and fell to the floor with Nenda on top of him. ” — and now the tendril has gone completely. Be ready to reel in the line and the neural cable. We are coming out.”

With Nenda’s body set over his right shoulder in a fireman’s lift, Tally began to walk slowly back from the center of the chamber. Another minute, and he was by the side of Julius Graves. Together they lowered Louis Nenda to the floor.

Birdie Kelly stared at the pitted and noduled chest, gray and disfigured. “Look at that. What did they do to him?”

Graves bent low, studying the roughened skin. “Nothing was done here, according to Steven. This is a Zardalu augment, designed to permit a human to speak to a Cecropian via pheromonal transfer. We thought this was a lost technology, and a banned one. There must be places in the Communion where the old slave races had mastered and retained parts of the Zardalu sciences.”