Did Robert’s mood flicker with a note of relief? Athaclena felt his crude but effective ejnotional guard go opaque.

“Hmmm. Well, there is a legend,” he said. “A simple story told by wolflings. It could hardly be of interest to a sophisticated Galactic, I suppose.”

Athaclena eyed him carefully and touched his arm, stroking it gently. “Are you going to make me wait while you draw out this mystery with dramatic pauses? Or will you save yourself bruises and tell me what you know at once?”

Robert laughed. “Well, since you re so persuasive. You just might have picked up the empathy output of a Garthling.”

Athaclena’s broad, gold-flecked eyes blinked. “That is the name my father used!”

“Ah. Then Uthacalthing has been listening to old seisin hunters’ tales… Imagine having such after only a hundred Earth years here… Anyway, it’s said that one large animal did manage to escape the Bururalli, through cunning, ferocity, and a whole lot of Potential. The mountain men and chims tell of sampling traps robbed, laundry stolen from clotheslines, and strange markings scratched on unclimbable cliff faces.

“Oh, it’s probably all a lot of eyewash.” Robert smiled. “But I did recall those legends when Mother told me I was to come up here. So I figured, so that it wouldn’t be a total loss, I might as well take a Tymbrimi along to see if she could flush out a Garthling with her empathy net.”

Some metaphors Athaclena understood quite readily. Her fingernails pressed into Robert’s arm. “So?” she asked with a questing lilt. “That is the entire reason I am in this wilderness? I am to be a sniffer-out of smoke and legends for you?”

“Sure,” Robert teased. “Why else would I come out here, all alone in the mountains with an alien from outer space?”

Athaclena hissed through her teeth. But within she could not help but feel pleased. This human sardonicism wasn’t unlike reverse-talk among her own people. And when Robert laughed aloud, she found she had to join him. For the moment all worry of war and danger was banished. It was a welcome release for both of them.

“If such a creature exists, we must find it, you and I,” she said at last.

“Yeah, Clennie. We’ll find it together.”

TAASF Scoutship Proconsul hadn’t outlived its pilot after all. It had seen its last mission — the ancient boat was dead in space — but within its bubble canopy life still remained.

Enough life, at least, to inhale the pungent stench of a six days unwashed ape — and to exhale an apparently unceasing string of imaginative curses.

Fiben finally ran down when he found he was repeating himself. He had long ago covered every permutation, combination, and juxtaposition of bodily, spiritual, and hereditary attributes — real and imaginary — the enemy could possibly possess. That exercise had carried him all the way through his own brief part in the space battle, while he fired his popgun weaponry and evaded counterblows like a gnat ducking sledgehammers, through the concussions of near-misses and the shriek of tortured metal, and into an aftermath of dazed, confused bemusement that he did not seem to be dead after all. Not yet at least.

When he was sure the life capsule was still working and not about to sputter out along with the rest of the scoutboat, Fiben finally wriggled out of his suit and sighed at his first opportunity to scratch in days. He dug in with a will, using not only his hands but the lingers and tumb of his left foot, as well. Finally he sagged back, aching from the pounding he had been through.

His main job had been to pass close enough to collect good data for the rest of the defense force. Fiben guessed that zooming straight down the middle of the invading fleet probably qualified. Heckling the enemy he had thrown in for free.

It seemed the interlopers failed toxappreciate his running commentary as Proconsul plunged through their midst. He’d lost count of how many times close calls came near to cooking him. By the time he had passed behind and beyond the onrush-ing armada, Proconsul’s entire aft end had been turned into a glazed-over hunk of slag.

The main propulsion system was gone, of course. There was no way to return and help his comrades in the desperate, futile struggle that followed soon after. Drifting farther and farther from the one-sided battle, Fiben could only listen helplessly.

It wasn’t even a contest. The fighting lasted little more than a day.

He remembered the last charge of the corvette, Darwin, accompanied by two converted freighters and a small swarm of surviving scoutboats. They streaked down, blasting their way into the flank of the invading host, turning it, throwing one wing of battlecruisers into confusion under clouds of smoke and waves of noisome probability waves.

Not a single Terran craft came out of that maelstrom. Fiben knew then that TAASF Bonobo, and his friend Simon, were gone.

Right now, the enemy seemed to be pursuing a few fugitives off toward Ifni knew where. They were taking their time, cleaning up thoroughly before proceeding to supine Garth.

Now Fiben resumed his cursing along a new tack. All in a spirit of constructive criticism, of course, he dissected the character faults of the species his own race was unfortunate enough to have as patrons.

Why? he asked the universe. Why did humans — those hapless, hairless, wolfling wretches — have the incredibly bad taste to have uplifted neo-chimpanzees into a galaxy so obviously run by idiots?

Eventually, he slept.

His dreams were fitful. Fiben kept imagining that he was trying to speak, but his voice would not shape the sentences, a nightmare possibility to one whose great-grandfather spoke only crudely, with the aid of devices, and whose slightly more distant ancestors faced the world without words at all.

Fiben sweated. No shame was greater than this. In his dream he sought speech as if it were an object, a thing that might be misplaced, somehow.

On looking down he saw a glittering gem lying on the ground. Perhaps this was the gift of words, Fiben thought, and he bent over to take it. But he was too clumsy! His thumb refused to work with his forefinger, and he wasn’t able to pluck the bauble out of the dust. In fact, all of his efforts seemed only to push it in deeper.

Despairing finally, he was forced to crouch down and pick it up with his lips.

It burned! In his dream he cried out as a terrible searing poured down his throat like liquid fire.

And yet, he recognized that this was one of those strange nightmares — the kind in which one could be both objective and terrified at the same time. As one dreamself writhed in agony, another part of Fiben witnessed it in a state of interested detachment.

All at once the scene shifted. Fiben found himself standing in the midst of a gathering of bearded men in black coats and floppy hats. They were mostly elderly, and they leafed through dusty texts as they argued with each other. An oldtime Talmudic conclave, he recognized suddenly, like those he had read about in comparative religions class, back at the University. The rabbis sat in a circle, discussing symbolism and biblical interpretation. One lifted an aged hand to point at Fiben.

“He that lappeth like an animal, Gideon, he shall thou not take …”

“Is that what it means?” Fiben asked. The pain was gone. Now he was more bemused than fearful. His pal, Simon, had been Jewish. No doubt that explained part of this crazy symbolism. What was going on here was obvious. These learned men, these wise human scholars, were trying to illuminate that frightening first part of his dream for him.

“No, no,” a second sage countered. “The symbols relate to the trial of the infant Moses! An angel, you’ll recall, guided his hand to the glowing coals, rather than the shining jewels, and his mouth was burned…”