“Mount Fossey,” Elsie said, concisely. And Robert knew, at once, why the chims felt this might be a safe place… safe enough even for their precious gorillas.

Only a few semi-active volcanoes lay along the rim of the Sea of Cilmar. Still, all through the Mulun there were places where the ground occasionally trembled. And at rare intervals lava poured forth. The range was still growing.

Mount Fossey hissed. Vapor condensed in shaggy, serpentine shapes above geothermal vents, where pools of hot water steamed and intermittently burst forth in frothing geysers. The ubiquitous transfer vines came together here from all directions, twisting into great cables as they snaked up the flanks of the semi-dormant volcano. Here they held market in shady, smoky pools, where trace elements that had percolated through narrow trails of hot stone finally entered the forest economy.

“I should’ve guessed.” Robert laughed. Of course the Gubru would be unlikely to detect anything here. A few unclothed anthropoids on these slopes would be nothing amid all this heat, spume, and chemical potpourris. If the invaders ever did come to check, the gorillas and their guardians could just melt into the surrounding jungle and return after the interlopers left.

“Whose idea was this?” he asked as they approached under the shade of a high forest canopy. The smell of sulfur grew stronger.

“Th’ gen’ral thought of it,” Elsie answered.

Figures. Robert didn’t feel resentful. Athaclena was bright, even for a Tymbrimi, and he knew he himself wasn’t much above human average, if that. “Why wasn’t I told about it?”

Elsie looked uncomfortable. “Um, you never asked, ser. You were busy with your experiments, findin’ out about the optical fibers and the enemy’s detection trick. And …”

Her voice trailed off.

“And?” he insisted.

She shrugged. “And we weren’t sure you wouldn’t ever get dosed with th’ gas, sooner or later. If that happened you’d have to report to town for antidote. You’d be asked questions — and maybe psi-scanned.”

Robert closed his eyes. Opened them. Nodded. “Okay. For a moment there I wondered if you trusted me.”

“Ser!”

“Never mind.” He waved. Athaclena’s decision had been proper, logical — once again. He wanted to think about it as little as possible.

“Let’s go see the gorillas.”

They sat about in small family groups and were easily distinguished at a distance — much larger, darker, and hairier than their neo-chimpanzee cousins. Their big, peaked faces — as black as obsidian — bore expressions of peaceful concentration as they ate their meals, or groomed each other, or worked at the main task that had been assigned them, weaving cloth for the war.

Shuttles flew across broad wooden looms, carrying homespun weft over warped strands, snicking and clicking to a rhythm matched by the great apes’ rumbling song. The ratcheting and the low, atonal grunting followed Robert as he and his party moved toward the center of the refuge.

Now and then a weaver would stop work, putting her shuttle aside to wave her hands in a flurry of motion, making conversation with a neighbor. Robert knew sign-talk well enough to follow some of the gossip, but the gorillas seemed to speak with a dialect that was quite different from that used by infant chims. It was simple speech, yes, but also elegant in its own way, with a gentle style that was all their own.

Clearly, these were not just big chims but a completely different race, another path taken. A separate route to sentience.

The gorilla groups each seemed to consist of a number of adult females, their young, a few juveniles, and one hulking silver-backed adult male. The patriarch’s fur was always gray along his spine and ribs. The top of his head was peaked and imposing. Uplift engineering had altered the neo-gorilla’s stance, but the bigger males still had to use at least one knuckle when they walked. Their huge chests and shoulders made them too top-heavy still to move bipedally.

In contrast, the lithe gorilla children moved easily on two legs. Their foreheads were rounded, smooth, without the severe sloping and bony brow ridges that would later give them such deceptively fierce countenances. Robert found it interesting how much alike infants of all three races looked — gorillas, chims, and humans. Only later in life did the dramatic’ differences of inheritance and destiny become fully apparent.

Neoteny, Robert thought. It was a classic, pre-Contact theory that had proven more valid than not — one proposing that part of the secret of sapiency was to remain as childlike as possible, for as long as possible. For instance, human beings retained the faces, the adaptability, and (when it was not snuffed out) the insatiable curiosity of young anthropoids, even well into adulthood.

Was this trait an accident? One which enabled pre-sentient Homo habilis to make the supposedly impossible leap — uplifting himself to starfaring intelligence by his own bootstraps? Or was it a gift from those mysterious beings some thought must have once meddled in human genes, the long-hypothesized missing patrons of humanity?

All that was conjecture, but one thing was clear. Other Earthly mammals largely lost all interest in learning and play after puberty. But humans, dolphins — and now, more and more with each generation, neo-chimpanzees — retained that fascination with the world with which they entered it.

Someday grown gorillas might also share this trait. Already these members of an altered tribe were brighter and remained curious longer than their fallow Earthly kin. Someday their descendants, too, might live out their life spans forever young.

If the Galactics ever allow it, that is.

Infant gorillas wandered about freely, poking their noses into everything. They were never slapped or chastised, only pushed gently aside when they got in the way, usually with a pat and a chuffed vocalization of affection. As he passed one group, Robert even caught a glimpse of a gray-flanked male mounting one of his females up in the bushes. Three youngsters crawled over the male’s broad back, prying at his massive arms. He ignored them, simply closing his eyes and hunkering down — doing his duty by his species.

More infants scurried through breaking foliage to tumble in front of Robert. From their mouths hung strips of some plastic material that they chewed into frayed tatters. Two of the children stared up at him in something like awe. But the last one, less shy than the others, waved its hands in eager, if sloppy signs. Robert smiled and picked the little fellow up.

Higher on the hillside, above the chain of fog-shrouded hot springs, Robert saw other brown shapes moving through the trees. “Younger males,” Elsie explained. “And bulls too old to hold a patriarchy. Back before the invasion, the planners at th’ Howletts Center were trying to decide whether to intervene in their family system. It’s their way, yes, but it’s so hard on the poor males — a couple years’ pleasure and glory, but at the cost of loneliness most of the rest of their lives.” She shook her head. “We hadn’t made up our minds before the Gubru came. Now maybe we’ll never get the chance.”

Robert refrained from commenting. He hated the restrictive treaties, but he still had trouble with what Elsie’s colleagues had been doing at the Howletts Center. It had been arrogance, to take the decision into their own hands. He could see no happy outcome to it.

As they approached the hot springs, he saw chims moving about seriously on various errands. Here one peered into the mouth of a huge gorilla easily six times her mass, probing with a dental tool. There another patiently taught sign language to a class of ten gorilla children.