Dead Gens were scattered across the wheat stubble like broken dolls, drained of life, nagerically nonexistent but visible to the eye. Satisfied Simes, glowing with post-kill repletion, stood languorously among the dead.

Off to one side, a girl, one of the older children who had been helping with the harvest, was kneeling beside the body of Herg Lol, sobbing. His daughter, Rimon realized. Abel Veritt went to her, putting his arms around her—himself still resonating with post-kill. He shared her tears, offering words of comfort.

Behind Rimon, there was a dull sobbing, edging into gasped words. "Oh, God. What have I done? What have I done…" It was Carlana Lodge. Del knelt beside her, saying, "Protected the lives of your friends and your children —that's what."

"But I killed," she sobbed. "I wasn't in need—and I killed—I killed a real person—and—and I enjoyed it!"

Abel Veritt signaled to his wife, who came to take the sobbing girl from his arms. Then he turned to the Simes around him, those from Fort Freedom all beginning to realize that they had violated their beliefs.

"Listen to me!" he said firmly. "No one here sinned today. We killed, yes—I killed with you, in defense of our community. Gather now and let us pray together that we will never yield to the temptation of the kill for its own sake. Let us thank God that we were warned in time to prevent even more senseless slaughter. Let us not forget the people from town who came to aid us."

The Simes from town had stayed apart during all this. Now one of the men said, roughness covering his embarrassment, "We only come to get them Gens…"

"Whatever your motives," Veritt replied, "we're grateful for your help in our time of trouble. I see you've lost three of your number. We shall pray for their souls."

"Much good that'll do 'em!" said the woman from the store. Then, under the impact of Veritt's sincerity, she added, "I guess your prayin' for 'em can't hurt 'em none."

"Let us pray, then, for all the souls perished here today, and for our own." Rimon, feeling as out of place as the Simes from town, stood silently, as did Del. But he saw Carlana's anguish dissolve as she prayed. Whatever Veritt had, it was clearly good for the Simes who followed him. But Rimon wondered at the idea of the pleasure of the kill being the wrong rather than the kill itself. With Kadi, he had the pleasure—without the kill. Would Veritt consider that a sin?

After the prayer, as they began to clear away the bodies, Veritt came up to him. "I see that you have prayed with us, though you yourself resisted the temptation of a vain kill. Yes, I saw you twice surrender a Gen to one in true need. It is on the battlefield that one comes to know a man."

Rimon shook his head, restraining an impulse to gesture with a tentacle. "I can't take credit for…"

"And that, itself, is to your credit, young man."

Suddenly they heard a gasp. "Risko! He's still alive!"

The woman who ran the Pens in town was kneeling beside the still form of a Sime Rimon recalled seeing before —oh yes, one of the riders who had laughed at him for his choice of homestead. Well, they'd been right.

He went to the woman's side, and found that the man's body was not merely pluming off residual selyn as a dead body did, but pulsing slightly with escaping life. There was a gaping wound in his chest.

He must have taken a kill just before he was shot or he wouldn't have survived this long. Rimon zlinned him.

Abel Veritt said, "Can you help him, Mr. Farris?"

"I don't know." He'd helped Kadi, a Gen, overcome some aches and pains—but what did he know about healing a Sime of a mortal wound?

"If we can't stop the blood and selyn loss," said the woman, "he's a goner. I don't know no way to do that!"

"He's not in attrition yet," Rimon said, kneeling beside the man. "Let me try." But he had spoken on impulse. He had no idea how to go about it. He strove to make nageric contact with the Sime's wavering fields as he always had with Kadi. But she was Gen; she fitted neatly into his patterns. He fumbled and then—suddenly—he had it. Not stopping to wonder how he did it, Rimon found the man's weak but pulsating field with its gross anomaly at the point where cells were dying. But it felt as if the selyn were being drained out of him, drained and drained, and he was dying. He came up out of it fighting for breath, his nerves screaming attrition.

He was lying on his side, curled into a tight ball, shaking. Abel Veritt and the Sime woman from town sat him up, coaxed him back to life, watching him expectantly. Rimon felt closed in, claustrophobic—surrounded by Simes, the world empty of life. Simes replete from the kill but using selyn, consuming it irretrievably, draining away all the life in the world, with no way to replenish it…

"Kadi!" gasped Rimon, aching for her constantly rising field.

"Shall I send someone for your wife, Mr. Farris?" asked Veritt, deeply concerned.

"Yes!… No, wait…" Something—at the edge of consciousness… "She's here."

Rimon couldn't even wonder how she got there, couldn't question the miracle. "Help me, Kadi… this man… I'm trying to stop the selyn loss."

Coming to him, Kadi gasped as she saw Risko's wound. She put one hand on Rimon's shoulder as he knelt over the wounded man again, and her attention focused onto him. Calm again, he forgot himself and zlinned the dying man. The entire selyn field had darkened around the edges; all selyn was drawn to the dreadfully bright area of the wound.

In Kadi's Gen field, the anomalies were dark areas in which the cells did not produce a steady pulse of selyn, and he had eased her pain by inducing an increase to normal levels of production. In the Sime field before him, the cells about the wound were drawing too much selyn from Risko's body, both consuming and wasting it at an accelerated rate, death coming in a black wave from the farthest points of his body.

It didn't frighten him now, with Kadi's field enveloping him. But he had to stop that selyn loss. He lowered his hands into the plume, his laterals extending. He had that funny wobbly trembling in his chest that Del used to complain about, but then it stopped, leaving a strange, intense clarity that was painful deep in his chest. But Rimon ignored that, concentrating on the selyn plume, willing it to diminish.

And, gradually, it did. He could zlin the stillness about the wound now, the flesh cooling—the blood clotting.

At last the wound was closing. Every time Rimon's attention wavered, small rivulets of blood and selyn would break free again. He concentrated, holding and holding, waiting until the healing was strong enough to hold by itself.

At last he took his hands away, and the wound held. There were soft gasps in the pure silence around him. He leaned back against Kadi, breathing in long, panting gasps as if he'd been running a race. He was more tired than he'd been from the battle itself. The world began to wobble again, but he blinked it away, drawing strength from somewhere.

The Sime woman was staring at him in astonishment, Rimon smiled at her. "You can move him now, if you're careful. He's not unconscious, just asleep. But he's going to need a kill again tomorrow—maybe the next day. I think it might do him good if you brought his kill to him as soon as you can."

"I can supply him with the best," said the Pen woman. "I owe him my life more times than I can count. But—" She ran her hand, tentacles extended, over the wound. "How did you do it? He was dyin'!"

"A miracle," murmured Abel Veritt.

"No," said Rimon. "I don't think so. He's so low-field– even the selyn plume was weak. All I did was block it with my field—a kind of nageric tourniquet."

"I seen a gypsy do that once," said the Sime woman. "Over to Ardo Pass—man got mauled by a mountain cat. No way to stop the bleedin'. This gypsy man done what you done—or something like it."