They climbed another side canyon that was hardly more than a split in the side of a mammoth bulwark of stone. Down the narrow defile floated soft wisps of fog, made opalescent by multiple refractions of daylight. There were rainbows, and once, when the sun came out behind and above him, Robert looked down at a bank of drifting moisture and saw his own shadow surrounded by a triply colored halo, like those given saints in ancient iconography.

It was the glory … an unusually appropriate technical term for a perfect, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree reverse rainbow — much rarer than its more mundane cousins that would arch over any misty landscape, lifting the hearts of the blameless and the sinful alike.

If only I weren’t so damn rational, he thought. If I didn’t know exactly what it was, I might have taken it as a sign.

He sighed. The apparition faded even before he turned to move on.

There were times when Robert actually envied his ancestors, who had lived in dark ignorance before the twenty-first century and seemed to have spent most of their time making up weird, ornate explanations of the world to fill the yawning gap of their ignorance. Back then, one could believe in anything at all.

Simple, deliciously elegant explanations of human behavior — it apparently never mattered whether they were true or not, as long as they were incanted right. “Party lines” and wonderful conspiracy theories abounded. You could even believe in your own sainthood if you wanted. Nobody was there to show yo.u, with clear experimental proof, that there was no easy answer, no magic bullet, no philosopher’s stone, only simple, boring sanity.

How narrow the Golden Age looked in retrospect. No more than a century had intervened between the end of the Darkness and contact with Galactic society. For not quite a hundred years, war was unknown to Earth.

And now look at us, Robert thought. I wonder, does the Universe conspire against us? We finally grow up, make peace with ourselves… and emerge to find the stars already owned by crazies and monsters.

No, he corrected himself. Not all monsters. In fact, the majority of Galactic clans were quite decent folk. But moderate majorities were seldom allowed to live in peace by fanatics, either in Earth’s past or in the Five Galaxies today.

Perhaps golden ages simply aren’t meant to last.

Sound traveled oddly in these closed, rocky confines, amid the crisscross lacing of native vines. One moment it seemed as if he were climbing in a world gone entirely silent, as if the rolling wisps of shining haze were folds of cotton batting that enveloped and smothered all sound. The next instant, he might suddenly pick up a snatch of conversation — just a few words — and know that some strange trick of acoustics had carried back to him a whispered remark between two of his scouts, possibly hundreds of meters away.

He watched them, the chims. They still looked nervous, these irregular soldiers who had until a few months ago been farmers, miners, and backwoods ecological workers. But they were growing more confident day by day. Tougher and more determined.

And more feral, Robert also realized, seeing them flit into and out of view among the untamed trees. There was something fierce and wild in the way they moved, in the way their eyes darted as they leaped from branch to branch. One seldom seemed to need words to know what the other was doing. A grunt, a quick gesture, a grimace, these were often more than enough.

Other than their bows and quivers and handspun weapons pouches, the chims mostly traveled naked. The softening trappings of civilization, the shoes and factory-made fabrics, were all gone. And with them had departed some illusions.

Robert glanced down at himself — bare-shanked, clad in breechcloth, moccasins, and cloth knapsack, bitten, scratched and hardening every day. His nails were dirty. His hair had been getting in the way so he’d cut it off in front and tied it in back. His beard had long ago stopped itching.

Some of the Eatees think that humans need more uplifting — that we are ourselves little more than animals. Robert leaped for a vine and swung over a dark patch of evil-looking thorns, coming to land in an agile crouch upon a fallen log. It’s a fairly common belief among the Galactics. And who am I to say they’re wrong?

There was a scurry of movement up ahead. Rapid hand signals crossed the gaps between the trees. His nearby guards, those directly responsible for his safety, motioned for him to detour along the westward, upwind side of the canyon. After climbing a few score meters higher he learned why. Even in the dampness he caught the musty, oversweet smell of old coercion dust, of corroding metal, and of death.

Soon he reached a point where he could look across the little vale to a narrow scar — already healing under layers of new growth — which ended in a crumpled mass of once-sleek machinery, now seared and ruined.

There were soft chim whispers and hand signals among the scouts. They nervously approached and began picking through the debris while others fingered their weapons and watched the sky; Robert thought he saw jutting white bones amid the wreckage, already picked clean by the ever-hungry jungle. If he had tried to approach any closer, of course, the chims would have physically restrained him, so he waited until Elsie returned with a report.

“They were overloaded,” she said, fingering the small, black flight recorder. Emotion obviously made it hard for her to bring forth words. “They were tryin’ to carry too many humans to Port Helenia, the day just after th’ hostage gas was first used. Some were already sick, and it was their only transport.

“The flitter didn’t clear th’ peak, up there.” She gestured at the fog-shrouded heights to the south. “Must’ve hit th’ rocks a dozen times, to fall this far.

“Shall… shall we leave a couple chims, sir? A … a burial detail?”

Robert scuffed the ground. “No. Mark it. Map it. I’ll ask Athaclena if we should photograph it later, for evidence.

“Meanwhile, let Garth take what she needs from them. I…”

He turned away. The chims weren’t the only ones finding words hard right now. With a nod he set the party going again. As he clambered higher, Robert’s thoughts burned. There had to be a way to hurt the enemy worse than they had so far!

Days ago, on a dark, moonless night, he had watched while twelve selected chims sailed down onto a Gubru encampment, riding the winds on homemade, virtually invisible paper gliders. They had swooped in, dropped their nitro and gas bombs, and slipped away by starlight before the enemy even knew anything was happening.

There had been noise and smoke, uproar and squawking confusion, and no way at all to tell how effective the raid was. Nevertheless, he remembered how he had hated watching from the sidelines. He was a trained pilot, more qualified than any of these mountain chims for a mission like that!

But Athaclena had given firm instructions to which the neo-chimps all adhered. Robert’s ass was sacred.

It’s my own damn fault, he thought as he scrambled through a dense thicket. By making Athaclena his formal consort, he had given her that added status she had needed to run this small insurrection… and some degree of authority over him, as well. No longer could he do as he damn well pleased.

So, she was his wife now, in a fashion. Some marriage, he thought. While Athaclena kept adjusting her appearance to look more human, that only served to remind him of what she couldn’t do, frustrating Robert. No doubt that was one reason why interspecies consortions were rare!

I wonder what Megan thinks of the news … 7 wonder if our messenger ever got through.

“Hssst!”

He looked quickly to his right. Elsie stood balanced on a tree branch. She pointed upslope, to where an opening in the fog exposed a view of high clouds skimming like glass-bottomed boats on invisible pressure layers in the deep blue sky. Underneath the clouds could be seen the tree-fringed slope of a mountain. Narrow curls of smoke spiraled upward from shrouded places on its flanks.