Gailet swallowed. She bowed and seemed to have difficulty finding her voice.

You can do it, Fiben urged silently. Speechlock could strike any chim, especially under pressure like this, but he knew he dared not do anything to help her.

Gailet coughed, swallowed again, and managed to bring forth words.

“Hon-honored elder, we … we cannot speak for our patrons, or even for all the chims on Garth. What you ask is … is …”

The Suzerain spoke again, as if her reply had been complete. Or perhaps it simply was not considered impolite for a patron-class being to interrupt a client.

“You have no need — need not … to answer now,” the vodor pronounced as the Gubru chirped and bobbed on its perch. “Study — learn — consider… the materials you will be given. This opportunity will be to your advantage.”

The chirping ceased again, followed by the buzzing vodor.

The Suzerian seemed to dismiss them then, simply by closing its eyes.

As if at some signal invisible to Fiben, the pilot of the hover barge banked away from the frenzied activity atop the ravaged hilltop and sent the craft streaking back across the bay, northward, toward Port Helenia. Soon the battleship in the harbor — gigantic and imperturbable — fell behind them in its wreath of mist and rainbows.

Fiben and Gailet followed a Kwackoo to seats at the back of the barge. “What was all that about?” Fiben whispered to her. “What was the damn thing sayin’ about some sort of ceremony? What does it want us to do?”

“Sh!” Gailet motioned for him to be silent. “I’ll explain later, Fiben. Right now, please, let me think.”

Gailet settled into a corner, wrapping her arms around her knees. Absently, she scratched the fur on her left leg. Her eyes were unfocused, and when Fiben made a gesture, as if to offer to groom her, she did not even respond. She only looked off toward the horizon, as if her mind were very far away.

Back in their cell they found that many changes had been made. “I guess we passed,all those tests,” Fiben said, staring at their transformed quarters.

The chains had been taken away soon after the Suzerain’s first visit, that dark night weeks ago. After that occasion the straw on the floor had been replaced by mattresses, and they had been allowed books.

Now, though, that was made to seem Spartan, indeed. Plush carpeting had been laid down, and an expensive holo-tapestry covered most of one wall. There were such amenities as beds and chairs and a desk, and even a music deck.

“Bribes,” Fiben muttered as he sorted through some of the record cubes. “Hot damn, we’ve got something they want. Maybe the Resistance isn’t over. Maybe Athaclena and Robert are stinging them, and they want us to—”

“This hasn’t got anything to do with your general, Fiben,” Gailet said in a very low voice, barely above a whisper. “Or not much, at least. It’s a whole lot bigger than that.” Her expression was tense. All the way back, she had been silent and nervous. At times Fiben imagined he could hear wheels turning in her head.

Gailet motioned for him to follow her to the new holo wall. At the moment it was set to depict a three-dimensional scene of abstract shapes and patterns — a seemingly endless vista of glossy cubes, spheres, and pyramids stretching into the infinite distance. She sat cross-legged and twiddled with the controls. “This is an expensive unit,” she said, a little louder than necessary. “Let’s have some fun and find out what it can do.”

As Fiben sat down beside her, the Euclidean shapes blurred and vanished. The controller clicked under Gailet’s hand, and a new scene suddenly leaped into place. The wall now seemed to open onto a vast, sandy beach. Clouds filled the sky out to a lowering, gray horizon, pregnant with storms. Breakers rolled less than twenty meters away, so realistic that Fiben’s nostrils flared as he tried to catch the salt scent.

Gailet concentrated on the controls. “This may be the ticket,” he heard her mumble. The almost perfect beachscape flickered, and in its place there suddenly loomed a wall of leafy green — a jungle scene, so near and real that Fiben almost felt he could leap through and escape into its green mists, as if this were one of those mythical “teleportation devices” one read of in romantic fiction, and not just a high-quality holo-tapestry.

He contemplated the scene Gailet had chosen. Fiben could tell at once that it wasn’t a jungle of Garth. The creeper-entwined rain forest was a vibrant, lively, noisy scene, filled with color and variety. Birds cawed and howler monkeys shrieked.

Earth, then, he thought, and wondered if the Galaxy would ever let him fulfill his dream of someday seeing the homewor\d. Not bloody likely, the way things are.

His attention drew back as Gailet spoke. “Just let me adjust this here, to make it more realistic.” The sound level rose. Jungle noise burst forth to surround them. What is she trying to do? he wondered.

’ Suddenly he noticed something. As Gailet twiddled with the volume level, her left hand moved in a crude but eloquent gesture. Fiben blinked. It was a sign in baby talk, the hand language all infant chims used until the age of four, when speech finally became useful.

Grownups listening, she said.

Jungle sounds seemed to fill the room, reverberating from the other walls. “There,” she said in a low voice. “Now they can’t listen in on us. We can talk frankly.”

“But — ” Fiben started to object, then he saw the gesture again. Grownups listening…

Once more his respect for Gailet’s cleverness grew. Of course she knew this simple method would not stop snoopers from picking up their every word. But the Gubru and their agents might imagine the chims foolish enough to think it would! If the two of them acted as if they believed they were safe from eavesdropping…

Such a tangled web we weave, Fiben thought. This was real spy stuff. Fun, in a way.

It was also, he knew, dangerous as hell.

“The Suzerain of Propriety has a problem,” Gailet told him aloud. Her hands lay still on her lap.

“It told you that? But if the Gubru are in trouble, why—”

“I didn’t say the Gubru — although I think that’s true, as well. I was talking about the Suzerain of Propriety itself. It’s having troubles with its peers. The priest seriously overcom-mitted itself in a certain matter, some time back, and now it seems there’s hell to pay over it.”

Fiben just sat there, amazed that the lofty alien lord had deigned to tell an earthworm of a Terran client such things. He wasn’t comfortable with the idea. Such confidences were likely to be unhealthy. “What were these overcommitments?” he asked.

“Well, for one thing,” Gailet went on, scratching her kneecap, “some months ago it insisted that many parties of Talon Soldiers and scientists be sent up into the mountains.”

“What for?”

Gailet’s face took on an expression of severe control. “They were sent searching for … for Garthlings.”

“For what?” Fiben blinked. He started to laugh. Then he cut short when he saw the warning flicker in her eyes. The hand scratching her knee curled and turned in a motion that signified caution.

“For Garthlings,” she repeated.

Of all the superstitious nonsense, Fiben thought. Ignorant, yellow-card chims use Garthling fables to frighten their children. It was rich to think of the sophisticated Gubru falling for such tall tales.

Gailet did not seem to find the idea amusing, though.

“You can imagine why the Suzerain would be excited, Fiben, once it had reason to believe Garthlings might exist. Imagine what a fantastic coup it would be for any clan who claimed adoption rights on a pre-sentient race that had survived the Bururalli Holocaust. Immediate takeover of Earth’s tenancy rights here would be the very least of the consequences.”

Fiben saw her point. “But… but what in the world made it think in the first place, that—”